Department of History

Ayodeji Adegbite is a historian of Africa and its diasporic communities with an emphasis on the history of science, medicine, technology, and the environment, spanning precolonial to postcolonial periods. Ayodeji is currently completing his first book manuscript, Nigeria’s Biomedical Public: African Medical Practitioners in the Environment, Politics, and Science of Disease Control in Africa, 1861 –1990. The project examines the place of African medical practitioners and the public in the development and institutionalization of biomedical knowledge in colonial and postcolonial West Africa, as well as the challenges Africans posed to Western scientific framings and understandings of health and illness in Africa. 

 

He has received fellowships and awards for his scholarship, including one from the Institute for Research in the Humanities. He was a visiting scholar at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society as a partner in the European Research Council (ERC) sponsored project, “Fragments of the Forest: Hot Zones, Disease Ecologies, and the Changing Landscapes of Environment and Health in West Africa.” He is also a co-convener of the Tejumola Olaniyan Research Group on Global Black Studies. 

 

Ayodeji received his Ph.D. in History of Science, Medicine, and Technology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2025. His work is featured or is forthcoming in the Bulletin of the History of Medicine and the Journal, Environmental History.