This time last year, Tolulope (Tolu) Akinwole was juggling finishing up his dissertation with academic job applications and interviews. Since then, Tolu successfully defended his dissertation and accepted a tenure-track position as Assistant Professor of African Literatures and Cultures in the Department of English Language and Literatures, University of British Columbia—in other words, Tolu struck academic job market gold!
A former Dana-Allen Dissertation Fellow (2023–2024), Tolu received his PhD in Literary Studies from UW–Madison in 2024, where he was also a Fulbright Scholar in African Cultural Studies in 2016. His dissertation, “Vehicular Articulations: Public Buses, Cityness, and Cultural Aesthetics in Postcolonial Africa,” assembles the literary, artistic, musical, and filmic archives that have formed around Africa’s public buses to rethink African urbanity. But his work on this project is not done—he is now in the process of revising the dissertation for publication under the title Moving Parts: Automobile Aesthetics in Postcolonial Africa. In addition to working on his monograph, Tolu is engaged in collaborative work with Catherine M. Cole, professor of English and Dance at the University of Washington, on a forthcoming podcast series. The series attends to global Black cultural studies through the work of the late Tejumola Olaniyan, who taught at UW–Madison until his passing in 2019 and was at one time interim director of IRH as well as a fellow himself.
Tolu’s transition from graduate student to professor has thus far been smooth, thanks in part to UW–Madison’s multi-disciplinary richness, which, he says, “opened [him] to opportunities for cross-campus collaborations.” He also credits the relative ease of this transition to his mentors at UW–Madison in the English department, who coincidentally are all former IRH fellows: Monique Allewaert (resident fellow, 2020–2021), Russ Castronovo (resident fellow, 2012–2013), and Ainehi Edoro-Glines (Race, Ethnicity, and Indigeneity fellow, 2024–2025). “Monique Allewaert particularly modeled the kind of mentorship I hope my own students get from me: rigorous, patient, and alert,” Tolu noted. “Those are the adjectives with which I frame my teaching, research, and mentorship.” 
At UBC, Tolu teaches English courses that vary in scope and level. Most recently, he co-taught a course with three UBC colleagues titled “Narrating Place,” which introduced students to literary studies. In the spring semester, he’ll be teaching his “dream” course: African Climate Fiction. The course will explore how diverse African cultural imaginaries challenge the Western narrative of environmental tragedy and that narrative’s weak capacity to track the connections of rural and urban spaces, and the logics of extraction that often ride on Western rhetoric of environmentalisms. Tolu will also be teaching a graduate seminar on African literature and postcolonial automobility, which will consider the corollary effects of Africa’s automobile network of road, spatiality, coloniality, infrastructure, motor vehicle, and oil on the artistic imaginations of African cultural producers in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
There is much that Tolu misses about Madison—the Terrace and his community, but also IRH, to which he gives thanks for providing him with time to write his dissertation, the suggestions he received during his Monday seminar presentation, and the advice he received on his application materials. He is especially grateful to the fellows who helped prepare him for interviews, including Amanda Shubert (ACLS resident fellow, 2023–2024), Silva Chelsea (Solmsen Fellow, 2023–2024), and Ayodeji Adegbite (Coleman Dissertation Fellow, 2023–2024). But even though Tolu is now 2,000 miles away, reminders of Madison are everywhere—posters gifted to him by Mario Ortiz-Robles (open-topic senior fellow, 2021–2025) now adorn his office (see pictured). We wish Tolu all the best for his second semester at UBC and eagerly await the publication of his first book.