BIOGRAPHY

Ayodeji Olugbuyiro is the inaugural Dr. Anthony B. Pinn Postdoctoral Associate in the Center for African and African American Studies. He broadly researches the cultural, intellectual, and political links that connect Africa with its global diasporas. His work traces how ideas, aesthetic practices, and spiritual traditions travel between Africa, Brazil, the United States, and Portugal. His ongoing book project examines how Afro-Brazilians and African Americans imagine Africa and draw on African-derived cultural and religious frameworks to reshape identity, reclaim heritage, and articulate agency. He has also written on postcolonial expressions of subjectivity among Black communities in Portugal, analyzing how they mobilize earlier currents of Black intellectual production—especially the Negritude movement—to confront contemporary racial formations and energize activism. His scholarship has been published or is forthcoming in the Journal of Lusophone Studies, the Portuguese Literary and Cultural Studies Journal, and other outlets.