Professor Oyeniyi
Okunoye, B.Ed, M.A., Ph.D. (Ibadan)

Dean,
Faculty of Arts

Professor of English, Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Nigeria

Professor Oyeniyi Okunoye holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Ibadan, where his doctoral research explored ethnic traditions in the African postcolonial poetic imagination. A scholar of notable breadth and depth, he specializes in African poetry, oral literature, literary theory, and the literature of the African diaspora. His teaching and research consistently interrogate the forms, traditions, and aesthetics that define the literary cultures of the Black world.

Professor Okunoye served as Head of the Department of English from 2014 to 2018 and is currently the Dean of the Faculty of Arts. He has published widely in leading international journals in literary and African studies and regularly reviews manuscripts for major scholarly outlets. He is the Editor of Nigerian Journal of Oral Literatures, a section editor of Postcolonial Text, and was also recently appointed a section editor of Tydskrif vir Letterkunde, South Africa’s oldest literary journal.

A widely respected scholar, Professor Okunoye has held visiting research appointments at the University of Cape Town, the University of Birmingham, the University of Cambridge, and the University of Bayreuth. His research has been supported by prestigious institutions including the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the British Academy, the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA), the Harry Oppenheimer Foundation, the University of Cambridge, the Nigerian Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund), and the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS).

He has also participated in collaborative projects funded by the European Research Council, the Carnegie Foundation and the Fulbright Program.

Beyond his research and teaching, Professor Okunoye is deeply committed to capacity-building in the humanities. He has mentored numerous early-career scholars across Africa and continues to play an active role in regional academic development initiatives.

His current research interests include Nigerian short fiction, emerging genres of written and performance poetry in West Africa, and the performance of identity and nationhood in African national anthems.

Dr. O.O Oyebode 

Vice-Dean Faculty of Arts

Reader

Oluwabunmi Opeyemi Oyebode (PhD) is a Reader in the Department of English, Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Nigeria. She was a Fulbright Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin, USA (2007/2008) and a Guest Researcher at the University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Denmark (2015/2016). She was also a recipient of the prestigious African Humanities Program Postdoctoral Fellowship (AHP) (2021/2022).

Her research interests include (Multimodal) Discourse Analysis (in which she co-authored two academic books in Multimodal Discourse Studies in Nigeria), New Media Communication and Applied/Cultural Linguistics. The major arguments in her research are that all semiotic resources deployed for representation are socially and culturally motivated for meanings; and visuals, like language, are strategically deployed as rhetorical tropes/discourse constructs in texts to project specific ideological stances as social milieu that resonate with the target audience.