Professor Wale Adebanwi

Rhodes Professor of Race Relations

Wale Adebanwi is the Rhodes Professor of Race Relations and the Director of the African Studies Centre, School of Interdisciplinary Area Studies, and Fellow of St Antony’s College.

He studied at the Universities of Lagos, Ibadan and Cambridge and previously taught at the University of California, Davis, USA, and University of Ibadan, Nigeria.

Adebanwi’s research focuses on how standard characterisations of ethno-regional and religious conflict and tension are changing in Nigeria. Generally, his research has focused on a range of topics addressing the question of the social mobilization of interest and power in contemporary Africa as manifested in nationalism and ethnicity, race relations, identity politics, elites and cultural politics, democratic process, newspaper press and spatial politics.

Adebanwi is the author of 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) and Authority Stealing: Anti-Corruption War and Democratic Politics in Post-Military Nigeria (Carolina Academic Press, 2012). His latest edited volume is The Political Economy of Everyday Life in Africa: Beyond the Margins (James Currey, 2017).

Since 2016, he has been Co-Editor of AFRICA: Journal of the International African Institute and before then the co-editor of the Journal of Contemporary African Studies.