Professor Wale Adebanwi

Rhodes Professor of Race Relations and Director, African Studies Centre, University of Oxford

Wale Adebanwi a member of the RISJ Steering Committee.

Wale is the Rhodes Professor of Race Relations and Director of the African Studies Centre, University of Oxford, UK. He is also a Fellow of St Antony’s College, Oxford, Fellow of Oxford Martin School and Associate Member of the Department of Politics and International Relations, Oxford University.

He is the author, editor and co-editor of nine scholarly books, including his authoritative book on the Nigerian press, The Nation as Grand Narrative: The Nigerian Press and the Politics of Meaning (University of Rochester Press, 2016). His scholarly essays on the Nigerian press have appeared in Media, Culture & Society, African Studies Review, and Nationalism and Ethnic Politics. Adebanwi has won many fellowships and grants, including the MacArthur Foundation Research and Writing Grant, Rockefeller Fellowship (Academic Writing Residency, Bellagio Centre, Italy), Visiting Fellowship, Centre for African Studies, Leiden, The Netherlands, the Global Service Institute Grant, Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, USA, Social Science Research Council (SSRC) Global Youth Fellowship, New York, and Oxford Martin School Grant on Governing African Transitions.

Wale holds a BSc in Mass Communication, MSc in Political Science and MPhil in Social Anthropology. He gained two doctorate degrees, one in political science from the University of Ibadan, Nigeria, and the other in Social Anthropology from the University of Cambridge, UK.

He has been a reporter, senior writer, editorialist, columnist, contributing editor, and editor with major newspapers in Nigeria, including Punch, Nigerian Tribune, Omega Weekly, TheNEWS magazine, and Business Day. He has also contributed to Dollar & Sense (US) and Mail and Guardian (South Africa). He has taught at universities in Africa, North America and Europe and was a Visiting Professor at the Institute of Social and Economic Research, Rhodes University Grahamstown, South Africa. Before moving to Oxford in 2017, he was a lecturer in Political Science at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria and Professor of African American and African Studies at the University of California-Davis, United States.