Wale Adebanwi is Presidential Penn Compact Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and holds a secondary appointment in the Department of Political Science. His research and teaching interests are in the broad area of the social mobilisation of power and interests in Africa as manifested in and/or through ethnicity, nationalism, racial and urban formations, elites, state and civil society, media, intellectual history, and social theory.
Professor Adebanwi received his BSc in Mass Communication from the University of Lagos, Nigeria, MSc in Political Science from the University of Ibadan, Nigeria, Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Ibadan, and MPhil and Ph.D. in Social Anthropology from Trinity Hall, University of Cambridge, UK. He studied at Cambridge as a Bill and Melinda Gates Scholar. His sole-authored monographs include Authority Stealing: Anti-Corruption War and Democratic Politics in Post-Military Nigeria (CAP, 2011), Yorùbá Elites and Ethnic Politics in Nigeria: Obáfémi Awólówò and Corporate Agency (Cambridge, 2014), The Nation as Grand Narrative: The Nigerian Press and the Politics of Meaning (Rochester, 2016). He is the editor or co-editor of ten books including Elites and the Politics of Accountability in Africa (University of Michigan Press, 2021), Everyday State and Democracy in Africa: Ethnographic Encounters (Ohio University Press, 2022) and Democracy and Nigeria’s Fourth Republic: Governance, Political Economy, and Party Politics 1999–2023 (James Currey, 2023).
He has been a co-editor of the Journal of Contemporary African Studies and AFRICA: Journal of the International Africa Institute. His scholarly articles have appeared in Theory, Culture and Society, Commonwealth and Comparative Politics, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Journal of Historical Sociology, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Citizenship Studies, Democratization, African Affairs, Journal of Modern African Studies, AFRICA: Journal of the International Africa Institute, and Review of African Political Economy.
He has been awarded grants and fellowships by the Macarthur Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Social Science Research Council (SSRC).
Before joining the University of Pennsylvania, he was, at various times, an assistant professor, associate professor, and full professor at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria, University of California, Davis, USA, and University of Oxford, UK. At the University of Oxford, he was the Rhodes Professor of Race Relations, Director of the African Studies Center (2017 and 2020), and Governing Board Fellow at St Antony’s College. He was a Visiting Professor at Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa and he is currently an Honorary Research Associate at the African Studies Center, Oxford.