DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY

Interests

Geographic Field(s):  African History

Thematic Field(s):  War and Empire in History; Urban History; Gender and Sexuality History; Colonial, Imperial, and Diasporic History; Religious History; African Diaspora and African American History; Environmental History

Principal Research Interest(s):  Africa since 400 BC

BIOGRAPHY

Akin Ogundiran (Ph.D., Boston, 2000) is an archaeologist and historian of pre-colonial Africa with a sustained focus on the Yoruba world from ca. 400 BC to 1840 AD and Atlantic Africa (1470-1850). His research and teaching interests center on the history of cultural formations, emergent social complexity, governance, empire, the city, the household, everyday life, and technology through the intersection of political economy, landscape, material culture, and environmental approaches. His ongoing research projects in southwest Nigeria include Early Iron Age community formation (ca. 400 BCE–100 CE), the political economy and social ecology of the Ifẹ and Ọyọ Empires (ca. 1000–1840), and the landscape history of the Ọsun-Oṣogbo Grove (1590 to the present), a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Ogundiran’s eclectic methodology combines archaeology with oral traditions, ritual archives, and geosciences, as well as landscape, ordinary language, performance, material culture, and written sources.

Dr. Ogundiran has received support for his research from the National Geographic Society, Archaeological Institute of America, National Humanities Center, Carnegie Foundation, Dumbarton Oaks, Social Science Research Council, Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, National Endowment for the Humanities, and American Philosophical Society, among others. 

Dr. Ogundiran is a past Editor-in-Chief of African Archaeological Review and a past President of the Society of Africanist Archaeologists. He directs the Material History Lab at Northwestern University. 

Publications

Dr. Ogundiran has authored, edited, and co-edited several books, including Archaeology and History in Ilare District, 1200-1900 (Cambridge Monograph in African Archaeology 55, 2002); Precolonial Nigeria (Africa World Press, 2005); Archaeology of Atlantic Africa and the African Diaspora (Indiana University Press, 2007); Power and Landscape in Atlantic West Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2012); and Materialities of Ritual in the Black Atlantic (Indiana University Press, 2014), which won a Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2015. His book, The Yoruba: A New History (2020), also won the 2022 Vinson Sutlive Book Prize and the 2022 Isaac Oluwole Delano Prize for Yoruba Studies. His other publications have appeared in several journals, including African Archaeological Review, African Studies Review, International Journal of African Historical Studies, American Historical Review, Science Advances, and Economic Anthropology. 

Teaching 

Ogundiran regularly offers the following courses: African Civilizations, Governance and Political Culture, Early Modern Empires, Black Atlantic Cultures, African Economic History, Drugs and Alcohol in African History, Global History of Waste, and Climate and Civilizations. He works with undergraduate and graduate students and postdoctoral fellows interested in interdisciplinary approaches to African history. 

Awards and Honors

• Fellow, American Academy of Arts and Sciences 
• Fellow, Nigerian Academy of Letters 
• Fellow, Antiquarian Society of London 
• Fellow, Archaeological Association of Nigeria 
• Senior Fellow, Garden and Landscape Studies, Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, DC 
• Certificate of Special United States Congressional Recognition for Excellence in Service