James Yékú

James Yékú is an Associate Professor of African and African-American studies at the University of Kansas, specializing in African literary and cultural studies, and digital humanities research. He is the author of Cultural Netizenship: Social Media, Popular Culture, and Performance in Nigeria (Indiana University Press, 2022) and the poetry collection Where The Baedeker Leads: A Poetic Journey, which received an honorable mention for the 2023 African Literature Association Best Book Award for creative writing. Yékú, a joint winner of the 2022 Pius Adesanmi Early Career Research Excellence Award from the Canadian Association of African Studies, has also received other awards and fellowships. Some of these include a 2022 Center for Advanced Internet Studies fellowship in Bochum, as well as a 2023 Cultural Entrepreneurship and Digital Transformation in Africa and Asia international guest fellowship at the University of Mainz, both in Germany. He is also a recipient of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation fellowship. Yékú currently spearheads African digital humanities initiatives at the University of Kansas and co-organizes the annual African Digital Humanities Symposium. His most recent publications are Ambivalent Encounters and Other Essays (Griots Lounge, 2024) and the academic monograph, The Algorithmic Age of Personality: African Literature and Cancel Culture scheduled for release by Michigan State University Press in spring 2025.