Olabode Ibironke
Associate Professor of English and African Studies, Rutgers University–New Brunswick
Fellow 2026–27
- Current Project
- The Republic of Laughter: Television and the Affective Archives of Postcolonial Nigeria
- Project Discipline
- African Studies
- Fellowship Title
- Robert D. Newman Fellowship
About Fellow
Olabode Ibironke is associate professor of English at Rutgers University–New Brunswick, where he is director of the Center for African Studies. He received his PhD in postcolonial and diaspora literatures from Michigan State University after earning his BA from Obafemi Awolowo University, Nigeria, and has taught at Obafemi Awolowo University, Michigan State University, the University of Minnesota, and Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of Remapping African Literature (Palgrave Macmillan), and his scholarship has appeared in leading journals including PMLA, The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, and History Compass. He is a two-time recipient of the Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship and a 2024–25 U.S. Fulbright Scholar in Nigeria.
Ibironke’s current book examines the history of popular comedy in Nigeria, tracing the relationship between performance, television, and everyday life to show how humor became a central medium through which ordinary people interpreted political change, negotiated modernity, and imagined community.
Selected Publications
- Ibironke, Olabode. The People’s Word, The World’s Poetics: Niyi Osundare and the Rearticulation of Second-Generation African Poetry. Abingdon: Routledge, forthcoming 2026.
- Ibironke, Olabode. “Bernth Lindfors’s Archive Fever.” Journal of the African Literature Association 16, no. 2 (2022): 231–41.
- Ibironke, Olabode. “Afropolitanism from Below.” PMLA 136, no. 5 (2021): 785–91.
- Ibironke, Olabode. Remapping African Literature. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.