Dr. Akinwole’s teaching and research coalesce around African literatures, African screen media, cultural and critical theory, global Black literatures, urban studies, infrastructure studies, and Black geographies. He is associate editor at Africanwriter.com, an online magazine of contemporary African and African diaspora literatures where he curates a series of interventions in African and African diaspora literatures and cultures. He also manages Africacartoons.com, an online repository of African political cartooning. Prior to coming to UBC, he obtained a bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Lagos; master’s degrees in English Language Linguistics, African Cultural Studies, and Literary Studies from the University of Lagos and the University of Wisconsin-Madison; and a doctoral degree in Literary Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

His current book project, Moving Parts: Automobile Aesthetics in Postcolonial Africa, examines cultural expressions of spatial anxieties through literary and artistic representations of the public bus in African cities. He studies the archives of literary, artistic, musical, and filmic texts that have formed around the public bus in order to offer the public bus as a key material through which to reorient current understandings of the global Black city.

Selected Publications

“On Chaos, Order, and Urban Improvisations: Narrativizing Postcolonial African Urbanity,” Journal of the African Literature Association, vol. 18, no. 2, 304 – 308

“Proximate Thuggery: A Preliminary Meditation on Three Cases from an African Postcolony,”  Matatu: Journal of African Culture and Society, vol. 54, iss. 2, 225 – 248

“Embodied Masculine Sovereignty, Reimagined Femininity: Implications of a Soyinkaesque Reading of Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther,” Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, vol. 7, no. 2, 147 – 157

Book Review Forum: Matthew H. Brown’s Indirect Subject: Nollywood’s Local Address, Journal of the African Literature Association, vol. 18, no. 1