Adedoyin Ogunfeyimi

Adedoyin Ogunfeyimi is an Assistant Professor of English. Ogunfeyimi holds a PhD in English from the University of Wisconsin in Madison and M.A. and B.A. in English from the University of Lagos in Nigeria. Before coming to the Pitt system (first Pitt-Bradford and now Pitt-Oakland), he taught and conducted research in writing, rhetoric, and Africana studies at the Institute of Writing and Rhetoric and in the Program in African and African American Studies in Dartmouth College. Presently, he serves on the editorial board of the Quarterly Journal of Speech, the oldest and flagship journal of the National Communication Association. In 2022 he received the Early Career Educator of Color Leadership award and Robert Hacke Teacher-Scholar award from the National Council of the Teachers of English and the College English Association respectively. His research interests focus on the history and theory of rhetoric from ethical, ontological, temporal, and divinatory perspectives.

He brings with him research interests from a revisionist rhetorical tradition. First, he studies the relations between media, environmental crises, and mythological figures in a non-western rhetorical context to understand how these figures, embodied by minority groups to construct an empowering ethos for themselves, can also disable the group's collective survival. He relies on the shifting behavioral patterns of the figures across multiple media and modes, what he depicts as "shifting divinities", to predict the degree of state, corporate, and public influences, interventions, and coercion on the local environmental movements. He studies these shifting behavioral patterns through Twitter, graffiti, photography, museum webs, documentaries, movies, and masks to extend the roles of mythological figures to minority bodies in rhetorical studies.

Second, he reconstructs the neo/colonial public black images through the private, decolonial black visual archives, one of which is the global black family albums. To do that, he developed the term "necropoligraphy", a neo/colonial visual angle of the view that grants photography a sovereign power to determine who lives or dies. This term borrows from and extends Archille Mbembe's "necropolitics". He sifts through the world de/colonial archives on Black visual culture to reclaim the hidden family, royal, and humane Black photographs/ers through what he calls "biovisualcy"— a production of new, different, and alternative Black images.

His work has either appeared—or is under consideration—in popular journals and edited book collections in the field of rhetoric, writing, and English studies.