Africa Initiative

Ayodeji Adegbite is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the History Department at Brown University. As a historian of Africa and its diasporic communities, his focus is on the history of science, medicine, technology, and the environment, spanning precolonial to postcolonial periods. Ayodeji is currently completing his first book manuscript, Nigeria’s Biomedical Public: African Medical Practitioners in the Environment, Politics, and Science of Disease Control in Africa, 1861 –1990. The project examines the place of African medical practitioners and the public in the development and institutionalization of biomedical knowledge in colonial and postcolonial West Africa, as well as the challenges Africans posed to Western scientific framings and understandings of health and illness in Africa. Ayodeji also serves on the Board of Directors of the Tejumola Olaniyan Foundation (TOF), an organization dedicated to preserving, promoting, and empowering research, scholarship, and creative projects in global Black cultural studies. His work has appeared in publications such as Democracy & Development: Journal of West African Affairs and The Environmental Humanities of Extraction.