I am a Research Fellow working with Dr Insa Nolte and Professor Koya Ogen on the ERC-funded project, ‘Knowing Each Other: everyday religious encounters, social identities and tolerance in southwest Nigeria.' The project centres on the everyday lives of Yoruba Muslims, Christians and traditionalists, and it explores the way in which religious differences and encounters structure the experiences, perceptions and behaviours of Yoruba individuals in their everyday social identities as men and women as well as members of different generations, and through life and family histories.
I am also currently researching my PhD here at Department of African Studies and Anthropology; my thesis explores twentieth century and contemporary travel writing by Nigerians, in both Yoruba and English, across a range of genres including newspaper travelogues, town histories, novels and contemporary internet-based travel writing and memoirs.
My main research interests are in Yoruba literature, print culture, language and history, in the interaction between English and Yoruba in Nigerian print culture, and in travel writing and representation of places.
As a researcher on the ERC project ‘Knowing Each Other,’ I work with the rest of the team to research everyday religious interactions in south-west Nigeria. I particularly work on qualitative and quantitative analysis of fieldwork results, including a large-scale surveys and interviews, and am also developing a project looking at textual representations – in books, pamphlets and newspapers – of multi-religious encounters.
My doctoral research is centred on travel writing by Nigerians, particularly in south-western Nigeria, across the twentieth and twenty-first century. I work with texts in both Yoruba and English, and across a wide variety of genres, including Yoruba/English town histories, early Yoruba/English newspapers such as Akede Eko and Eleti Ofe from the 1920s and 30s, novels and popular fiction, and contemporary travelogues, including internet-based writing. Part of my research traces the growth of travel writing in Nigeria out of a variety of genres, including oral itan or historical narratives, the experimental print culture of the 1920s and 30s, and also out of the interaction with the Western travel writing tradition. I'm also interested in what people have seen as the meanings of travel across the twentieth century, and how they use it to construct ideas about locality, difference and sameness. I historicise these meanings of travel throughout the twentieth century, and look at how these are changing in the works of contemporary travel writers.
I am a contributor to Waka About, a Lagos-based travel magazine, and am currently a postgraduate representative for the British Comparative Literature Association.