Abimbola adelakun biography

Since she moved to the United States in 2010, Abimbola Adelakun has lived a kind of double life. In the U.S., she is a respected junior academic, first a graduate student and now an assistant professor in the Department of African and African Diaspora Studies at The University of Texas at Austin. Last year she published her first academic book, Performing Power in Nigeria: Identity, Politics, and Pentecostalism(Cambridge University Press, 2021). 

In her native Nigeria, Adelakun is “a bit famous.” She is the author of a weekly political column for Punch, one of the most widely read newspapers in the country. Her column is read both at the highest levels of government and among the broad educated middle- and upper-classes. Her style is blunt and honest — “harsh,” she says — and committed to equal-opportunity criticism of whatever party or group is in power. 

I spoke to Adelakun about her life as a political colum

Huge in Nigeria - University of Texas at Austin