Toyin Falola’s biography, net worth, fact, career, awards and life story

Toyin Omoyeni Falola (born 1 January 1953 in Ibadan) is a Nigerian historian and professor of African Studies. He is currently the Jacob and Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities at the University of Texas at Austin. Falola earned his B.A. and Ph.D. (1981) in History at the University of Ife, Ile-Ife (now Obafemi Awolowo University), in Nigeria. He is a Fellow of the Historical Society of Nigeria and of the Nigerian Academy of Letters. Falola is author and editor of more than one hundred books, and he is the general editor of the Cambria African Studies Series (Cambria Press).

Academic works

His research interest is African History since the 19th century in the tradition of the Ibadan School; his geographic areas of interest include Africa, Latin America and the United States; and his thematic fields, Atlantic history, diaspora and migration, empire and globalization, intellectual history, international relations, religion and culture. Recent courses he has taught include Introduction to Traditional Africa, an interdisciplinary course on the peoples and cultures of Africa, designed for students with varied backgrounds in African Studies, and Epistemologies of African/Black Studies, a course on the rise and evolution of African/Black Studies, with a focus on pedagogy, methodology, and the historical development of scholarship in the field.

Falola began his academic career as a schoolteacher in Pahayi in 1970 and by 1981 he was a lecturer at the University of Ife. He joined the faculty at the University of Texas at Austin in 1991, and has also held short-term teaching appointments at the University of Cambridge in England, York University in Canada, Smith College of Massachusetts in the United States, The Australian National University in Canberra, Australia and the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs in Lagos, Nigeria.

Books

• Africa, Empire and Globalization. Essays in Honor of A. G. Hopkins, with Emily Brownell. Carolina Academic Press, Durham, NC (2011)
• The Atlantic World, 1450-2000, with Kevin David Roberts (2008), ISBN 0-253-21943-4
• Yoruba Creativity: Fiction, Language, Life and Songs, with Ann Genova (2005), ISBN 1-59221-336-7
• A History of Nigeria, with Matthew M. Heaton
• Britain and Nigeria: Exploitation or Development?
• Pawnship, Slavery, and Colonialism in Africa, with Paul E. Lovejoy (2003), ISBN 1-59221-039-2
• African Urban Spaces in Historical Perspective, with Steven J. Salm (2005), ISBN 0-89089-558-9
• Historical Dictionary of Nigeria, with Ann Genova
• Mouth Sweeter than Salt: An African Memoir
• Yoruba Warlords of the Nineteenth Century
• Yoruba Gurus: Indigenous Production of Knowledge in Africa
• The Power of African Cultures
• The Foundations of Nigeria, with Adebayo Oyebade (2003), ISBN 1-59221-120-8
• African Politics in Postimperial Times, with Richard L. Sklar (2001), ISBN 0-86543-985-0

TOFAC

In Nigeria, there is a conference named after Toyin Falola by the Ibadan Cultural Studies Group; a group chaired by Professor Ademola Dasylva. The conference, called The Toyin Falola International Conference on Africa and the African Diaspora (TOFAC), was first held in the Nigerian Premier University in Ibadan, the second was hosted in Lagos by the Centre for Black African Arts and Civilization (CBAAC) under the watch of the director general of the centre Professor Tunde Babawale.