Scholarly Research
My scholarship asks both who has been privileged in the production of knowledge about gender, sexuality, and literary cultures in the Global South — and who has been left out — and what happens when we center local, indigenous, and decolonial perspectives in those conversations. I work across two active research programs, each rooted in the same commitment to decolonial inquiry: a completed book on Nigerian literary history and an emerging project on transgender life writing from across the Global South. The three areas below describe the intellectual frameworks that run through both.
Research Area
African Literature
My work in African literature focuses on Nigerian literary history — how the institutions, networks, and ideologies of the colonial and postcolonial periods shaped which writers were published, celebrated, and taught, and which were not. I am particularly interested in the Mbari Club and its legacy, the role of international publishers like Heinemann in canonizing certain voices while marginalizing others, and the flourishing of contemporary LGBTQIA Nigerian fiction against a backdrop of severe legal repression. My first book, Queer Contiguities of Nigerian Literature (Michigan State University Press, 2026), brings this history into focus through archival research and close reading, tracing the long reach of heterocolonial modernity through Nigerian literary culture from the mid-twentieth century to the present.
Research Area
Global South Feminisms
I approach Global South feminisms as both a scholarly framework and a political commitment. My work draws on feminist scholars and activists writing from Africa, South Asia, Latin America, and their diasporas — including Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí, María Lugones, M. Jacqui Alexander, and Sylvia Tamale — to think about how gender, sexuality, and colonial power intersect in ways that Euro-American feminist frameworks often miss or distort. I am especially interested in how women writers in the Global South have theorized their own conditions — in fiction, memoir, and criticism — rather than waiting to be theorized about. This commitment to centering Global South feminist thought runs through both my published work on Nigerian literary history and my current research on transgender life writing across the Global South.
Research Area
Queer and Trans Theory
My engagement with queer and trans theory draws on the full global range of these frameworks — not only their Euro-American iterations but the queer and trans theory being produced by scholars, writers, and activists across Africa, South Asia, Latin America, Oceania, and their diasporas. I use these tools to explore sexual and gender diversity from a decolonial perspective, treating the Global South not as a test case for Western theory but as a generative site of theoretical production in its own right. This commitment shapes both my analysis of Nigerian literary history and my current research on transgender life writing across the Global South, where trans people are not only the subjects of scholarly inquiry but the authors of their own complex, world-making stories.
Invite Me to Speak
I love talking about this work with new audiences — whether that's a graduate seminar wrestling with postcolonial theory, a community organization thinking about LGBTQIA rights and representation, or a general audience encountering African literature for the first time. If you are interested in booking a talk, panel, or workshop, I would love to hear from you.