Dr Senayon Olaoluwa

Senayon Olaoluwa is a lecturer and researcher interested in Diaspora and Transnational Studies. He is currently a Visiting Fellow at the Africa Studies Centre, University of Oxford, as part of the Africa Oxford Visiting Fellowship Programme.   

Senayon is affiliated with the Institute of African Studies at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria, where he teaches and researches Diaspora and Transnational Studies. He is also the Founder of the Ibadan School of Diaspora Studies. Dr Olaoluwa’s work has been published in African Affairs, African Studies Review, Journal of African Cultural Studies, Research in African Literatures, and ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment. Senayon obtained his PhD in Humanities from the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa.    

Senayon’s research is part of an ongoing theoretical and multidisciplinary examination of the antithesis of nostalgia, which he has termed “extalgia”. The project is located within broader discourse of exile and migration and contends that there are forms of suffering and creativity peculiar to those left behind in the homeland. The research explores African and African diaspora literary and cultural texts that include literature, film and visual arts.    

Senayon is currently working on a monograph, and his work at the University of Oxford, when completed, will result in a seven-chapter monograph provisionally entitled “Extalgia: Exile, Homeland Suffering and Creativity in African and Diaspora Experience.” He has completed his first chapter and will write four additional chapters. Each of the chapters is an original contribution. Taken together, they illustrate the complexity of the notion of extalgia and the intersection of the human and the non-human in the discourse of homeland suffering and creativity.