Dr. Rosemary Oyinlola Popoola  specializes in African and Afro-diasporic literature and cultures, specifically film, music, visual, popular, and celebrity culture through an intersectional lens. She gleans theoretically from critical Black feminism(s) and queer critique of color, blending critical archival research, literary analysis, ethnography, and decolonial approaches. Her research engages Africa and the Black diaspora as connected historically, and intellectually inseparable

She earned her first Ph.D. in international relations from Covenant University in 2018. Her first doctoral dissertation examined the promises of gender parity as dividends of democracy. Through a feminist lens, she examined the complexities of women-centered advocacy in the context of the disillusionment and dissonance that followed the return to democracy in 1999 after decades of military dictatorship. The dissertation won the 2019 Best Doctoral Thesis of the Lagos Studies Association.

Dr. Popoola has teaching experiences across two continents—in Africa (Nigeria) and North America (United States). She has almost ten years of experience teaching and researching in higher education in Nigeria. Her classes focus on the overlap and detours in race, women, gender, and sexualities in Africa and the African Diaspora. In the United States, as a principal instructor, she taught multiple classes, including Africa in postcolonial films and literature, feminism in African film and literature, Afro-queer, and introduction to African cultural expression. She also worked as a teaching assistant for classes such as Black Music and American History, Introductory to Africa, African Storyteller, Introduction to African Literature, and Introduction to African Cultural Expression.

Dr. Popoola’s work has been published in many reputable journals, including the Journal of Popular Music Studies, Journal of African Cultural Studies, Journal of Cultural Research, Women Studies International Forum, Feminist Africa, the Canadian Journal of African Studies, and the Journal of Asian and African Studies, among others. Her research has been supported by the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA), UW-Madison Graduate School, and the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, to mention a few. Dr. Popoola organized panels on fame, fandom, celebrities, politics, and the economics of attention in African popular culture for three consecutive years at the Lagos Studies Association Annual Conference, one of the biggest academic gatherings on the continent.

Beyond research, Dr. Popoola has served in various capacities. including as International Office and Linkages coordinator at Chrisland University, Nigeria; secretary of the International Organizing Committee, Gender Mainstreaming in Higher Education and Forensic Victimology; and assistant cluster head, Gender, Peace & Conflict Resolution. She has been featured as a panelist and discussant in such events as the United Nations Day series on gender and human rights (2019, 2020) hosted by the United Nations Association of Nigeria (UNAN) and the United Nations Information Centre Nigeria.

Currently, she is a Ph.D. candidate (ABD) in African Cultural Studies with a doctoral minor in Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her second dissertation reads the history of popular music against the grain, making room for women and queer artists who have been silenced in scholarship and social production. Her research reclaims their voice, agency, and resistance against hegemonic masculinity and heteronormativity.