Dr Damilola Adebayo is an Assistant Professor at the Department of History. He is a historian of Anglophone West Africa, particularly Nigeria. His research and teaching interests are at the intersection of three fields namely social and economic history; science, technology and society (STS); and the role of international organizations in the African past.
His current research theme investigates the socioeconomic life of Western technologies in Africa since the 1850s. He is keen to understand the varied contexts within which Western energy, communication, and transportation technologies were adopted, appropriated, hybridized, reinvented, or discarded by the upper class and everyday people; and the ways in which these technologies have been a cause and effect of change in African societies. A product of this theme is his ongoing book project, provisionally entitled “Electric Urbanism: Technology and Socioeconomic Life in Nigeria.”
Dr Adebayo holds a PhD in History from the University of Cambridge, where he was a Cambridge-Africa Scholar (2016–20). His work has been supported by many grants and fellowships.
Research keywords: History; science and technology; modern Africa; Nigeria; social and economic history; international organizations; labour; urbanism and urbanization; cities