- Olabode Ibironke
- Associate Director, Center for African Studies
- Associate Professor of English
- CV Upload
- oi26@rutgers.edu
- Phone Number: (848) 932-6683
- Office: Murray Hall, Room 033, College Ave Campus
- Office Hours:
Weds 12-2
- Primary Areas of Specialization: Diasporic African literature, postcolonial book history, World Anglophone literature.
- Field of Interest: African-American & Diaspora, Postcolonial
- About:
"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."
- Undergraduate Courses Taught:
- Seminar: Topics in Colonial and Postcolonial Literature
- Introduction to World Literatures in English
- Introduction to Black Literature
- Awards:
- 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.
- Membership Affiliations:
- African Literature Association.
- African Studies Association.
- Modern Language Association.
- International Association for Languages and Intercultural Communication
- Other Publications:
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”. - Education: Ph.D, English, Michigan State University MA, Comparative literature, Michigan State UniversityBA, Literature in English, Obafemi Awolowo University Ile-Ife.