"I conceive the classroom as a social space instrumental to the development of vocational, institutional/corporate and, more important, intellectual objectives. I negotiate these objectives through improvisational, practical educational tactics and self-reflexive questioning. My goal is always to balance the competing functions of university education: first, to ensure that my class helps in preparing students to take their place in civil society and in a democracy, that they are empowered and equipped to participate in a global culture. Second, I am fully aware that students may come to my class with expectations dictated by their own professional and vocational needs. And third, I try to make central and enjoyable, the very processes of an intellectual discipline as if it were an end in itself. Our entire class activities are deployed in such a way as to embody these objectives, but also to open them up, always hoping for the possibility of their redefinition."
Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship 2009—2011, Department of English, Johns Hopkins University.
The Big Ten Universities Committee on Institutional Cooperation Postdoctoral Fellowship 2008-09, Department of English, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.
Dissertation completion fellowship 2008, College of Arts and Letters, Michigan State University.
The John A. Yunck Award for Excellence 2005-06, Department of English, Michigan State University.
Varg-Sullivan Award for Outstanding Achievement in Arts and Letters 2005-06, College of Arts and Letters, Michigan State University.
Mellon Predissertation Fellowship, Institute of Historical Research, The University of London 2004.
Special College Research Abroad Money, Michigan State University, 2004.
African Literature Association.
African Studies Association.
Modern Language Association.
International Association for Languages and Intercultural Communication
Most recent: "Du Bois, the African Union, and the Anthropological Discourse of Modernity" Social Identities. Pal Ahluwalia, and Toby Miller, eds.
In progress: • “Richard Wright, Maya Angelou, and Henry Louis Gates Jr. : The Ontology of Black Travel Literature”. • “Editing Chinua Achebe’s Arrow of God”.
Ph.D, English, Michigan State University MA, Comparative literature, Michigan State University BA, Literature in English, Obafemi Awolowo University Ile-Ife.
