Dialogues: USA Africa Dialogue Series - PROFESSOR TUNDE AKINYEMI TO INTERVIEW ALAO ADEDAYO

Wednesday, October 13, 2021

USA Africa Dialogue Series - PROFESSOR TUNDE AKINYEMI TO INTERVIEW ALAO ADEDAYO

PROFESSOR TUNDE AKINYEMI TO INTERVIEW ALAO ADEDAYO

Tunde Akinyemi is a professor of African Language and Literature and chair of the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, the University of Florida in Gainesville. He is an affiliate faculty in the Center for African Studies, where he directs the African Flagship Languages Initiative program funded by the US Department of Defense National Security Education Program (NSEP) through the Institute for International Education in Washington. From 2005 to 2016, he directed the Yoruba Group Project Abroad (GPA) in Nigeria for the US Department of Education, first, at Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, and later, at the University of Ibadan.

Akinyemi's research interests include Yoruba language pedagogy and African literature, popular culture, and the Yoruba Diaspora in the New World. Between 1999 and 2001, he was a postdoctoral research fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation at the Institute of African Studies, the University of Bayreuth in Germany and the Center for West African Studies, the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom. He is the author of Orature and Yoruba Riddles (Palgave Macmillan, 2015), Yoruba Royal Poetry: A Socio-historical Exposition and Annotated Translation (Bayreuth African Studies Series (BASS), 71, 2004); co-author of a French-Yoruba dictionary, Dictionnaire usual Yoruba-français (Karthala-IFRA, 1997); and co-editor of Encyclopedia of the Yoruba (Indiana University Press, 2016), four volumes of essays – The Handbook of African Oral Traditions and Folklore (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2021), Emerging Perspectives on Femi Osofisan (Africa World Press, 2010), Sango in Africa and the African Diaspora (Indiana University Press, 2009), and Emerging Perspectives on Akinwumi Isola (Africa World Press, 2008). He is co-editor of the journal Yoruba Studies Review.