The Institute of African Studies is very pleased to announce that Dr. Nduka Otiono has joined us as a tenure-track assistant professor in African Studies. Dr. Nduka joins the over 40 cross-appointed faculty members to the Institute, bringing a wealth of experience in journalism and writing in Nigeria and deep scholarly expertise in African popular culture.
Nduka Otiono obtained his PhD in English from the University of Alberta where he won several awards including the Izaak Walton Killam Memorial Scholarship, and was nominated for the Governor General’s Gold Medal for academic distinction. Before joining Carleton University as a Banting Postdoctoral Fellow in the Institute of African Studies for two years, he held a one-year postdoctoral fellowship at Brown University where he was also appointed a Visiting Assistant Professor. A fellow of the William Joiner Centre for War and Social Consequences, University of Massachusetts, Boston, his interdisciplinary research focuses on “street stories” or popular urban narratives in postcolonial Africa, and how they travel across multiple popular cultural platforms such as the mass transit system, the news media, film, popular music, and social media.
He is interested in the political relevance of “street stories” and how everyday people speak to power through such informal channels. He has recently completed a five-country research tour of Africa for his first academic monograph on street stories in Africa. Also a writer, he is the author of The Night Hides with a Knife (short stories), which won the ANA/Spectrum Prize; Voices in the Rainbow (Poems), a finalist for the ANA/Cadbury Poetry Prize; Love in a Time of Nightmares (Poems) for which he was awarded the James Patrick Folinsbee Memorial Scholarship in Creative Writing. He has co-edited We-Men: An Anthology of Men Writing on Women (1998), and Camouflage: Best of Contemporary Writing from Nigeria (2006). His research interests include Cultural Studies, Oral Literature, Postcolonial Studies, Media and Communication Studies, Globalization and Popular Culture.