Wale Adebanwi

Wale Adebanwi

Fellow: Awarded 2024
Field of Study: African Studies

Competition: US & Canada

Wale Adebanwi is Presidential Penn Compact Professor, Department of Africana Studies, University of Pennsylvania with a secondary appointment in the Department of Political Science. He is the Director, Center for Africana Studies at Penn and an Honorary Research Associate in the African Studies Center, Oxford University, UK. His research is in the broad area of the social mobilisation of power and interests in Africa as manifested in and/or through ethnicity, nationalism, racial and urban formations, elites, state and civil society, media, intellectual history, and social theory. He earned two doctorate degrees in Political Science (University of Ibadan, Nigeria) and in Social Anthropology (Trinity Hall, Cambridge University). He was a Bill and Melinda Gates Scholar at Cambridge. He is the author of Authority Stealing: Anti-Corruption War and Democratic Politics in Post-Military Nigeria (2011), Yorùbá Elites and Ethnic Politics in Nigeria: Obáfémi Awólówò and Corporate Agency (2014), Nation as Grand Narrative: The Nigerian Press and the Politics of Meaning (2016), and How to Become a Big Man in Africa: Subalternity, Elites, and Ethnic Politics in Contemporary Nigeria (2024). He has received grants and fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, and the Social Science Research Council (SSRC).

Scroll to Top