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About Yékú

My love for literature began with the irreverence of the trickster, with evening tales I heard growing up in Lagos marked by characters like Anansi and clever turtles constantly outwitting more powerful adversaries. Those stories followed me to Ibadan, Nigeria’s literary capital, where I trained in English and, later, performance studies. And, then, to the Canadian prairies where I received a PhD in English at the University of Saskatchewan. Today, with screens, algorithms, AI, and social media in the mix, I study how contemporary African narratives and cultural productions circulate in the wired and unruly ecologies of digital media.

As an Associate Professor of African Digital Humanities at the University of Kansas, my research focuses on the role of the digital in African literary and cultural studies, as well as the creation of digital cultural records and the use of computational methods to analyze born-digital African popular culture, such as Nollywood posters and internet memes.

I am 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 received an honourable mention for the 2023 African Literature Association Best Book Award for creative writing. My most recent publications are Ambivalent Encounters and Other Essays (Griots Lounge, 2024) and a second monograph The Algorithmic Age of Personality: African Literature and Cancel Culture (Michigan State University Press, 2025). I have given talks based on this book in Oxford, Berlin, Amherst, and Mainz.

A second poetry collection, A Phial of Passing Memories, was published in the summer of 2025. I have published my other work in Digital Studies / Le champ numérique, African Studies Review, Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, and the Journal of the African Literature Association (JALA). I also experiment with a couple of digital projects, including an Omeka-based project Digital Nollywood, a web-based archive of Nollywood film posters, and a digital scholarly edition of Onitsha Market literary pamphlets, using minimal computing platforms.

I am a joint winner of the 2022 Pius Adesanmi Early Career Research Excellence Award from the Canadian Association of African Studies. I have also received other awards and fellowships, including a 2022 Center for Advanced Internet Studies fellowship in Bochum, and a 2023 Cultural Entrepreneurship and Digital Transformation in Africa and Asia international guest fellowship at the University of Mainz, both in Germany. Additionally, I have received a Best Article Award from the African Literature Association, the CODESRIA Diaspora Visiting Fellowship to co-supervise a master’s thesis in English at the University of Ghana. I am also a recipient of the Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship. I currently lead African digital humanities initiatives at the University of Kansas and co-organize the annual African Digital Humanities Symposium.

I teach courses in African literature, postcolonial digital humanities, Black Masculinities, and African popular culture and social media. I am the managing editor of Africana Annual, a journal of African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Kansas. I also serve on the editorial boards of several journals, including the Journal of African Cultural Studies, and Hyperrhiz: New Media Cultures. In my free time, I enjoy experimenting with new recipes, watching/playing football, and writing poems or reading the poetry of the Psalms.

You may download a recent CV here.