Temitope Christopher Fagunwa

Temitope Fagunwa, PhD, is an African historian and African diaspora studies scholar whose research traces residual histories across the longue durée, from medieval Europe and Africa through transatlantic slavery and colonialism to postcoloniality. His work examines how the social power of accumulation, embedded in historical processes of mobility, exchange, enslavement, colonialism, and migration, produces enduring institutional, material, cultural, and social formations. He is particularly interested in how these historical processes leave material, social, and epistemic residues that continue to shape power, inequality, mobility, identity, and the relationship between Africa and the wider world. Between 2018 and 2026, Fagunwa served as an academic staff member at Osun State University, Nigeria, where he taught and conducted research in History and International Studies. In 2026, he completed two research fellowships in Germany: as a Fellow of the Leuphana Institute for Advanced Studies (LIAS) at Leuphana University Lüneburg and as a Research Fellow at the Herzog August Bibliothek (HAB), Wolfenbüttel. Fagunwa is also an active public intellectual and lecturer whose scholarship extends beyond the university classroom into international academic and Black intellectual spaces. During his LIAS fellowship, he delivered the lecture “Black Studies in Liberatory Discourse” as part of Leuphana’s Black History Month programme and convened the international workshop Black Presence and Influence in Europe Before the Atlantic Slavery. He has also delivered invited lectures and academic presentations in Germany and elsewhere in Europe, including the Joseph C. Miller Memorial Lecture at the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies in April 2026 and a lecture at the University of Marburg on the medieval formation of Black representation in European pharmacy. His interdisciplinary scholarship connects African history, political economy, diaspora studies, visual and material history, and cultural studies, seeking to reconstruct the historical connections through which Africa and its diaspora have shaped the wider world. In addition to his academic work, Fagunwa participates actively in Pan-African intellectual movements and has developed a public scholarly profile through lectures, workshops, conferences, and engagements with Black communities and cultural organizations.