Visiting Assistant Professor of English
B.S. Obafemi Awolowo University; M.A., Central European University; Ph.D., University of Alabama
Oluwafunmilayo Akinpelu (Funmi Omo Moji) earned her Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Alabama and her M.A. in Comparative History from Central European University. Her scholarship and teaching examine global Black Anglophone literatures through transdisciplinary approaches that engage African and African American cultural and new media studies, East Asian popular culture, digital rhetoric, postcolonial studies, as well as gender and sexuality studies.
Her current book project examines the intersections of print, digital, and oral cultures as vectors through which to understand Black literary and artistic production. The project examines how reconfigured, adaptive forms such as Afro-Anime, generative AI art, social media literature, and folkloric Africanfuturist feminist works are reshaping literary creation, circulation, and reception in the twenty-first century. By challenging traditional distinctions between literary, visual, and performance-oriented forms, print and digital media, her work proposes new ways of understanding global Black Anglophone and postcolonial literary histories.
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
• Akinpelu, Oluwafunmilayo. "From Third-Generation Nigerian Literature in English to the Twenty-First Century." Research in African Literatures, volume 54 no. 3, 2024, p. 147-165.
• Akinpelu, Oluwafunmilayo, Linda Silim Moundene, Ethel Mambo, Doris Kakuru,and Nadia Ncube. “Untold Stories of African Girlhoods: An Open Letter in Parts.”African Feminist Girlhood Studies and Development. Gender, Development and Social Change, edited by Catherine Cymone Fourshey, Palgrave Macmillan, 2026.
• Akinpelu, Oluwafunmilayo. “Nigeria’s Insta Poetry: Cultivating Inward, Ideological Activism, Revitalizing African Orality and Re-defining the Art of Poetry.” ALT 42: Oral and Written African Poetry and Poetics, edited by Ernest Emenyonu, Boydell & Brewer, 2024, pages 21-36.
A committed, student-centered teacher, Akinpelu teaches courses in ways that integrate literary studies, visual culture, and media analysis, fostering critical thinking and cultural literacy. She imbibes a humanist ethos to teaching in which students reckon with the relatable, everyday dimensions of being human through her courses. She is also very big on experiential and play-based learning.
Funmi is just as well an active independent curator of arts. Her curatorial practice foregrounds African and diasporic creative labor in digital, archival, and exhibitionary spaces. Her past exhibition projects includes the Digital Girlhood Museum project (2025-26), Still Life: I am Still Life photo exhibit (2026), Scheherazade’s Choir: The Radical Curation of Creative Processes (2024), Arts of War; Hearts of War (2023), and New Myths for a Dying World (2022). Her curatorial work engages communities outside academia through public humanities, and she holds a certificate in Museum Studies in recognition of her curatorial practice and engagement with performed scholarship and art.
Across her research, teaching, and curatorial practices, Funmi's work is driven by a commitment to intellectual accessibility and capturing present and future African and diasporic literary imaginaries with the hope of contributing to the range of epistemic resources needed to combat epistemic injustices in Africa and its elsewheres.
