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Faculty

Dr. Christopher Adejumo is an Associate Professor. He received his BA degree in Fine Arts (Graphic Design) in 1983 from the University of Benin, Nigeria. He earned an MFA in Visual Design (Printmaking) at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, 1993. Adejumo received his Ph.D. in Art Education from the Ohio State University in 1997.         

Dr. Adejumo’s current research interests are in the areas of community-based art education, visual and material culture art education, studio art as visual research, and service-learning in art education. His recent publications include “Migration and Slavery as Paradigms in the Aesthetic Transformation of Yoruba Art in the Americas,” in Toyin Falola, Niyi Afolabi, Aderonke A. Adesanya (Eds.). Movements, Migrations and Creative Expressions in Africa and the African Diaspora. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press; “Understanding Yoruba Art and Culture through Ethnography,” in Toyin Falola and Ann Genova (Eds.). Yoruba Creativity: Fiction, Language, Life and Songs. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, Inc.; and “Apprenticeship, Continuity and Patronage in Traditional Yoruba Art” in TRIBAL Magazine, No. 34, pp. 86-94.

Dr. Adejumo’s relief prints, low-relief sculptures, and paintings have been shown in over thirty state, national, and international exhibitions, of which twelve were solo exhibitions. He has also conducted over thirty visual art workshops at reputable venues, including the Dallas Museum of Art. In 2006, he collaborated with the Dallas Museum of Art in the production of a documentary on the Yoruba Ibeji or twin figures.  Adejumo is the founder and Director of the Greater Tomorrow Youth Art Program in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Texas at Austin. In 2004, he received the Eugene Grigsby Jr. national award for “outstanding contributions to community-based art education,” given by the National Art Education Association.


Dr. Omoniyi Afolabi is an Assistant Professor who teaches Lusophone and Yoruba Studies in the Department African and African Diaspora Studies and the Department Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Texas at Austin.  He holds a doctorate in Portuguese and Africana Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of The Golden Cage: Regeneration in Lusophone African Literature and Culture, editor of Marvels of the African World: African Cultural Patrimony, New World Connections and Identities, and co-editor of The Afro-Brazilian Mind / A Mente Afro-Brasileira: Contemporary Afro-Brazilian Literary and Cultural Criticism. His current research project focuses on the Brazilian manifestation of Yoruba identity.

Courses:

  • Second Year Yoruba I
  • Second Year Yoruba II
  • Lusophone Africa Literature(s) & Culture(s)
  • Afro-Luso-Brazilian Worlds
  • Yoruba Mythologies/Cosmologies
  • Yoruba (Diaspora) Literature and Film
  • Afro-Brazilian Diaspora
  • Africana Autobiographies 

Sponsored Activities:

  • Director of Yoruba Studies
  • Annual Yoruba Day Celebration  

 

Dr. Toyin Falola is Fellow of the Nigerian Academy of Letters and Fellow of the Historical Society of Nigeria, a Distinguished Teaching Professor and the Frances Higginbotham Nalle Centennial Professor in History at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of numerous books, including Violence in Nigeria: The Crisis of Religious Politics and Secular Ideologies and Nationalism and African Intellectuals, both from the University of Rochester Press. He is the co-editor of the Journal of African Economic History, Series Editor of Rochester Studies in African History and the Diaspora, Series Editor of the Culture and Customs of Africa by Greenwood Press, and Series Editor of Classic Authors and Texts on Africa by Africa World Press.

Dr. Falola has received various awards and honors, including the Jean Holloway Award for Teaching Excellence, The Texas Exes Teaching Award, the Chancellor's Council Outstanding Teaching Award, the Cecil B Currey Award for his book, Economic Reforms and Modernization in Nigeria. He is the 2006 recipient of the Felix E. Udogu Africa Award, the 2006 Cheikh Anta Diop Award, the 2007 Amistad Award, and the 2007 SIRAS Award for Outstanding Contribution to African Studies. For his distinguished contribution to the study of Africa, his students and colleagues have presented him with a set of three Festschriften, two edited by Adebayo Oyebade, The Transformation of Nigeria: Essays in Honor of Toyin Falola and The Foundations of Nigeria: Essays in Honor of Toyin Falola, and one by Akin Ogundiran, Precolonial Nigeria: Essays in Honor of Toyin Falola. His memoir, A Mouth Sweeter Than Salt, captures his childhood and received various awards. He has an honorary doctorate from Monmouth University, USA.

Courses:

  • Introduction to Africa
  • USA and Africa
  • Epistemologies of Black Studies
  • Modern Africa

Sponsored Activities:

  • Founder and Coordinator of the Africa Distinguished Lecture Series
  • Founder and Coordinator of the Annual Conference on Africa  


Dr. Omi Osun Joni L. Jones, Professor Emerita of African and African Diaspora Studies is the former Director of the John L. Warfield Center for African and African-American Studies. She is an artist/scholar who is currently engaged in performance ethnography around the Yoruba divinity Osun. While on a Fulbright Fellowship in Nigeria (1997-98), Dr. Jones taught at Obafemi Awolowo University and contributed to Theatre for Social Change workshops for the Forum on Governance and Democracy in Ile-Ife.  Her articles on performance and identity have appeared in Text and Performance Quarterly, The Drama Review, Theatre Journal, Theatre Topics, and Black Theatre News. Her performance ethnography includes “Searching for Osun,” “sista docta,” and “Broken Circles:  A Journey Through Africa and the Self.” She is the founder of the Austin Project—a collaboration of women of color artists, scholars, and activists who use art for re-imagining society, and a regular participant with the Center for Black and African Arts and Civilization (CBAAC). Her most recent publication is Experiments in a Jazz Aesthetic: Art, Activism, Academia, and the Austin Project (2010), co-edited with Lisa Moore and Sharon Bridgforth (UT Press 2010). 


Dr. Jossianna Arroyo Martínez is an Associate Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and the Center for African and African American Studies. Dr. Arroyo Martinez’s interests are in Latin American, Caribbean, Luso-Brazilian, Afro-Diasporic literatures and cultures, race, gender and sexuality in colonial and postcolonial societes, as well as Latin American discourses in literature, ethnography and sociology.

She studies African religions in the diaspora, performance, and the politics of culture, representation and political agency of Afrodescendants in the Americas. She has published Travestismos culturales: literatura y etnografía en Cuba y Brasil (Pittsburgh: Iberoamericana, 2003) and is currently finishing her second book entitled Fin de siglo: Secrecy and Technologies of the Word in Caribbean Freemasonry.

Courses:

  • African Diasporas in the Americas
  • African Diasporas in Latin America
  • Afro-Caribbean Diasporas

Sponsored Activities:

  • Coordinated the Performance in Africa and the African Diasporas (along with Prof. Christen Smith)
  • Coordination of Diaspora Talk guest, Dr. Frieda Ekotto
  • Organized the Afro-Latin American research cluster at LILLAS (Latin American Studies)  

 

Dr. Moyo Okediji is an art historian, artist, and curator. He studied fine arts at the University of Ife, before proceeding to the University of Benin, where he received an MFA in African art criticism, poetry, and painting. At the University of Wisconsin, Madison, he received a Ph.D. in African arts and Diaspora visual cultures.  He has apprenticed with several indigenous African artists working in both sacred and secular mediums including mat weaving, textile designs, terra cotta, shrine painting, and sculpture.

After teaching for several years in Nigeria, Okediji relocated to the United States in 1992. For ten years he was the curator of African and Oceanic arts at the Denver Art Museum. He has taught at various colleges in the United States, including Wellesley College, Gettysburg College, university of Wisconsin, Madison, and the University of Colorado at Denver. He has also exhibited at various places including the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, The Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC, the Corcoran Center, London, and the National Museum Gallery, Lagos Nigeria.  He is the author of books and exhibition catalogues including African Renaissance, Old Forms, New Images in Nigerian Art, and The Shattered Gourd: Yoruba Forms in Twentieth Century American Art.

Courses:

  • Museums and African Art: The Case of the Egungun Masquerade  
  • Diaspora Visions
  • Africana Women's Art
  • Yoruba Art and Mythologies  

 

Dr. Adebimpe Adegbite is an Assistant Professor who teaches linguistic anthropology, Yoruba language and culture, and African Diaspora studies at the University of Texas at Austin in the Department of African and African Diaspora Studies. He holds a BA in English from Obafemi Awolowo University, Nigeria, an MA in Linguistics from Syracuse University, Syracuse NY, an MA in Anthropology from Tulane University, New Orleans LA, and a PhD in Anthropology from Tulane University. He is the author of Àwíyè Òwe Yorùbá: Yoruba Proverbs for All and has published peer reviewed papers and book chapters on heritage language acquisition, family language policy, bi/multilingualism, discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, language teaching, and the pedagogical value of Yoruba proverbs.

Adegbite's research explores the intersections of language, culture, and society with particular attention to the revitalization and maintenance of minority and indigenous languages: for example, he studies how pedagogical innovations and family language policies can help reverse language shift and strengthen Yoruba and other African languages in diaspora contexts.

Courses:

  • Beginning Yoruba