Dr. Olúwábùnmi Bernard
I hold a Ph.D. in Yorùbá Language and Literature from Obafemi Awolowo University, Nigeria where I have taught Yorùbá literature and culture in undergraduate and graduate studies programmes for ten years. My research interests include Yorùbá language, Yorùbá oral and written literature, gender and sexuality, postcolonial, and environmental studies. I have authored and co-authored papers in these areas. I have won many prestigious fellowships. Among them are the University of Michigan African Presidential Scholars Programme (UMAPS), A.G. Leventis Fellowship at SOAS University of London, the Leventis Fellowship at the Centre of African Studies, University of Cambridge, and the African Humanities Programme (AHP) postdoctoral fellowship sponsored by the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS).
I recently completed the Netherlands Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS) individual fellowship for the 2023/2024 academic year. I also just completed my monograph titled “The Gods are Wise: Environmental Sustainability in Yorùbá sacred orature” which is currently being reviewed. I am a reviewer for journals, books, and fellowships and on the editorial board of the University of Amsterdam Press series on Liveable Futures. I have just recently joined the Yorùbá Print Culture project supervised by Prof. Dr. Shola Adenekan and funded by the European Research Council at Ghent University, Belgium.
Yorùbá print culture has always fascinated me because it documents and preserves a robust history, oral literature, culture and traditions, ritual practices and performances, and the worldview of a densely oral culture like the Yorùbá. Most of my access to the past, history and development of the Yorùbá has been facilitated and influenced mostly by the print culture. Pamphlets, reports, stories, newspapers in Yorùbá, novels, anthologies of Yorùbá poetry and performative culture (oríkì, ẹsẹ-Ifá, ẹ̀sà egúngún, ẹkún ìyàwó, Ọya pípè, Ìjálá, Ọ̀ṣun pípè, and others) were important sources whenever I am researching into the areas of gender and sexuality studies, postcolonial studies, environmental studies, identity politics, and African religions particularly, the Yorùbá Òrìṣà worship.
I am deeply motivated by the extensive work Karin Barber, Derek Peterson, Kelly Askew, and Rebecca Jones, to mention a few have done on African print cultures. My interest in Yorùbá print culture was initiated by my paternal grandfather who had a penchant for collecting Yorùbá newspapers Aláròyé and Akéde Àgbáyé. I spent my school breaks with him, and I was fascinated by the piles of the weekly newspapers neatly placed on the three-seater sofa in his sitting room and the bookshelf in his bedroom.
This was why working with Rebecca Jones, the author of At the Crossroads: Nigerian Travel Writing in Yoruba and English, to translate some excerpts from Aláròyé and Akéde Àgbáyé into English for her project on Print cultures during my Master’s degree program in 2011, came naturally to me.
My interest in Yorùbá studies has also benefited immensely from Yorùbá print culture and my curiosity has taken me to the University of Michigan’s Harlan Hatcher Graduate Library and Shapiro Library, the British Library (Asian and African Collection), British Museum, and Cambridge University Centre of African Studies library archives where I accessed archival materials about Yorùbá culture in the pre-and post-colonial eras. Coincidentally, in December 2022, while I was an A.G. Leventis fellow at the Centre of African Studies, Cambridge University, the Librarian of the Centre called my attention to a large collection of New Nigerian newspapers from 1965 to 1969 that was donated to the Centre’s library by Charles Sharp’s (founding Managing Director) son.
The collection contained some reports on Yorùbá religion, ritual practices and performances, and festivals in the 1950s and 60s. It was fascinating to see how the Yorùbá Òrìṣà worship and its ritual practices and performances have transformed over the decades. Pictures and reports of these ritual performances are part of my data on Yorùbá religions and environmental sustainability.