Wale Adebanwi

Wale Adewiwi
Born	Adewale Adebanwi 1969
Nationality	Nigerian
Occupation	University professor
Academic background
Education	University of Lagos, University of Ibadan, University of Cambridge
Academic work
Discipline	Social Anthropology, Political Science
Institutions	University of Pennsylvania
Main interests	Identity politics, race relations, elites and cultural politics, spatial politics and social change

Wale Adebanwi (born 1969) is a Nigerian-born first Black Rhodes Professor at St Antony's College, Oxford where he was, until June 2021, a Professor of Race Relations, and the Director of the African Studies Centre, School of Interdisciplinary Area Studies, and a Governing Board Fellow. He is currently a Presidential Penn Compact Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Adebanwi's research focuses on a range of topics in the areas of social change, nationalism and ethnicity, race relations, identity politics, elites and cultural politics, democratic process, newspaper press and spatial politics in Africa.

Education background

Wale Adebanwi graduated with a first degree in Mass Communication from the University of Lagos, and later earned his M.Sc. and Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Ibadan. He also has an MPhil. and a Ph.D. in Social Anthropology from the University of Cambridge.

Career

Adebanwi worked as a freelance reporter, writer, journalist and editor for many newspapers and magazines before he joined the University of Ibadan's Department of Political Science as a lecturer and researcher. He was later appointed as an assistant professor in the African American and African Studies Department of the University of California, Davis, USA. He became a full professor at UC Davis in 2016.

Adebanwi is the co-editor of Africa: Journal of the International African Institute and the Journal of Contemporary African Studies.

Works

His published works include:

• Nation as Grand Narrative: The Nigerian Press and the Politics of Meaning (University of Rochester Press, 2016)
• Yoruba Elites and Ethnic Politics in Nigeria: Obafemi Awolowo and Corporate Agency (Cambridge University Press, 2014)
• Authority Stealing: Anti-corruption War and Democratic Politics in Post-Military Nigeria (Carolina Academic Press, 2012)

In addition, he is the editor and co-editor of other books, including.

• The Political Economy of Everyday Life in Africa: Beyond the Margins (James Currey Publishers, 2017)
• Writers and Social Thought in Africa (Routledge, 2016)
• (co-edited with Ebenezer Obadare) Governance and the Crisis of Rule in Contemporary Africa (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016)
• (co-edited with Ebenezer Obadare) Democracy and Prebendalism in Nigeria: Critical Interpretations (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
• (co-edited with Ebenezer Obadare) Nigeria at Fifty: The Nation in Narration (Routledge, 2012)
• (co-edited with Ebenezer Obadare) Encountering the Nigerian State (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).

Awards

• Rhodes Professorship in Race Relations awarded by Oxford University to Faculty of African and Interdisciplinary Area Studies.