Hello, I’m Funmi. I Do Research. I Teach. I Curate. I Write. This is my little corner on the web.

About Me

I am a Nigerian literary scholar, curator, writer, and digital humanities practitioner whose work sits at the intersection of contemporary African literature, museum studies, feminist and futurist thought, and collaborative digital storytelling. I work in the fields of African and African American studies, global Black Anglophone literatures, gender and sexuality studies as well as cultural studies, digital media studies, and museum studies. I also have extensive professional experience curating performances of scholarship and art, supported by a certificate in Museum Studies.

I have successfully defended her dissertation, Naija-Lit-to-the-World: 21st Century Subcultures and the Reconfiguration of Nigerian Literary History, at the University of Alabama. This project examines twenty-first-century Nigerian literary and digital subcultures as globally mobile, theoretically generative sites of cultural production.

A committed, student-centered teacher, I teach courses in English Composition, American Literature, African American Literature, and others, in ways that integrate literary studies, visual culture, and media analysis, fostering critical thinking and cultural literacy. I am also an active independent curator of arts.

Photo by Will McLelland

Creative Writing

I am looking to finish writing a collaborative interactive novel I have been working on for a while titled, “Oriseje”. This is my dream creative project. But, for now, what I have out in the world are a self-published novel titled “Half Lives” and a short story titled “Moo: Second Cantos”. The only recognition to my name is a Pushcart Prize nomination for the short story, “Moo”. I have also written a chapbook of hybrid works titled “Fire Rat” and a collection of non-fiction essays titled, “Enikure” that I hope to publish very soon.


Explore VIDEOS RELATED TO MY CREATIVE ENDEAVORS

MEDIA ARCHIVE

This video project poses as a curated digital repository of #ENDSARS2020 related experiences. But even more, like the slogan Sorosoke, this project is the outcome of offering a few Nigerians a platform to emotively voice out lingering concerns, unsaid stories, pent-up agitations and bitter-sweet memories. For the project, the personalised narratives of ten Nigerian creatives were collated, compiled, and curatively edited into a singular, cohesive, coherent video of shared experiences that were showcased during a forum held on June 27, 2020, titled “Digital Storytelling and Artivism in Nigeria: The Case of the ENDSARS Movement.”

The project focuses on de-sanitizing the creative process in academia by placing an emphasis on the origins and cultivation of a creative work rather than focusing solely on the final product. We have asked some artists/scholars in the humanities to document their creative processes as they work towards a final product, eschewing the commodified productivity culture that is valued and demanded by academia. By emphasizing process as equally important to the final outcome, this project will focus on how the narrative of our own creative endeavors sustains us.

“Arts of War: Hearts of War” is a collaborative art exhibition at the Mildred Westervelt Warner Transportation Museum that features work from a broad range of artists, including University of Alabama students, veterans, and a prisoner to showcase the different perspectives and experiences of war. Oluwafunmilayo Akinpelu, exhibit director and UA Ph.D. student, worked with each participant to ensure collaborative and diverse displays of artwork. The project reminds us that war is not just about battle tanks, nuclear missiles, and bullets going off in far-away countries, but conflicts residing in the hearts and lives of people we know and love.
Moderated by Funmi Omo Moji, the panelists of this edition are interested in neo-Nollywood and its contact points with global Black diaspora; African visual culture as it focuses on animation in Nigeria; Yoruba Bollywood and African literature in the digital age; and rising stars in Nigeria’s filmmaking industry.
New Myths for a Dying World is a collaborative interactive storytelling project that envisions a future where the world needs saving from itself. The potential ‘saviors’ are artists who, through suspension of disbelief, assume the position of deities, chronicle nostalgic mythos about the past, converse about the fate of the current human species, and propose a new order where humans are better and trees have a life of their own.

Blog Posts

  • Oriseje: A Writer’s Postscript

    Hello Oriseje, After so many months of dreaming about you and thinking of you in different ways, in different places, at all times, you have finally taken your first leap out of my mind onto raw, white pages on the screen of my computer. You are still not quite well-formed; but I don’t think you…

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