James Túndé Yékú
James Túndé Yékú is a Nigerian-Canadian writer and associate professor of African and African-American Studies at the University of Kansas. He specialises in African literary and cultural studies, with additional expertise in digital humanities. His scholarly interests span African literature, social media, postcolonial and decolonial theories, cultural studies, and Nollywood. He is widely published in these fields.
Yékú is the author of Cultural Netizenship: Social Media, Popular Culture, and Performance in Nigeria (Indiana University Press, 2022), and the poetry collection Where The Baedeker Leads: A Poetic Journey, which earned an honorable mention for the 2023 African Literature Association Best Book Award for creative writing. His poems and essays have appeared in various international literary journals.
Education
James Yékú studied literary and cultural studies at the University of Ibadan and the University of Saskatchewan. He obtained:
- B.A. in English – University of Ibadan, 2008
- M.A. in Performance Studies – University of Ibadan, 2012
- Ph.D. in English – University of Saskatchewan, 2018
Career and Recognition
- 2017–2018: Lecturer, Department of English, University of Saskatchewan
- 2018–present: Associate Professor, Department of African and African-American Studies, University of Kansas
- Core Faculty Member, Institute for Digital Research in the Humanities
- Leader of African Digital Humanities initiatives at the University of Kansas
- Co-organizer of the annual African Digital Humanities Symposium
Awards and Fellowships
- 2022: Pius Adesanmi Early Career Research Excellence Award, Canadian Association of African Studies
- 2017: Abioseh Porter Best Essay Award, African Literature Association
- 2022: Fellow, Center for Advanced Internet Studies (CAIS), Bochum, Germany
- 2023: Guest Fellow, University of Mainz, Germany (Cultural Entrepreneurship and Digital Transformation)
- 2023: Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Fellow, Humboldt University, Berlin
Selected Publications
Books
- The Algorithmic Age of Personality: African Literature and Cancel Culture (2025), Michigan State University Press
- Ambivalent Encounters and Other Essays (2024), Griots Lounge Publishing Canada
- Cultural Netizenship: Social Media, Popular Culture, and Performance in Nigeria (2022), Indiana University Press
- Where the Baedeker Leads: A Poetic Journey (2021), Mawenzi House
Edited Anthology
- Sọ̀rọ̀sóke: An #Endsars Anthology (2022), Noirledge Publishing (with Jumoke Verisssimo)
Selected Journal Articles
- “Cultural netizenship as platformization of popular culture in Nigeria” – International Journal of Cultural Studies, 2024
- “#MakeNigeriaGreatAgain” – The Black Scholar, 2023
- “Cartooning COVID-19 on Facebook” – Springer, 2023
- “Digital African Literatures and the Coloniality of Data” – The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, 2022
- “In Praise of Ostentation: Social Class in Lagos and the Aesthetics of Nollywood’s Ówàḿbẹ̀ Genres” – African Studies, 2021
- “Chinua Achebe’s There Was a Country and the Digital Publics of African Literature” – Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 2019
- “The Hashtag as Archive: Internet Memes and Nigeria’s Social Media Election” – Springer, 2018
See Also
- List of Nigerian writers(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ListofNigerian_writers)
External Links
- James Yékú at the University of Kansas(https://afs.ku.edu/james-yeku)
- Twitter(https://twitter.com/james_yeku)