Damilola Adebayo is a historian of Anglophone West Africa, particularly Nigeria. His research and teaching interests are at the intersection of three fields namely social and economic history; science, technology and society (STS); and the role of international organizations in the African past.

Research Interests

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Damilola Adebayo is a historian of Anglophone West Africa, particularly Nigeria. His research and teaching interests are at the intersection of three fields namely social and economic history; science, technology and society (STS); and the role of international organizations in the African past.

Damilola Adebayo is a historian of Anglophone West Africa, particularly Nigeria. His research and teaching interests are at the intersection of three fields namely social and economic history; science, technology and society (STS); and the role of international organizations in the African past. His current research theme investigates the socioeconomic life of Western technologies in African cities since the 1850s. He is keen to understand the varied contexts within which Western energy, communication, and transportation technologies were adopted, appropriated, hybridized, reinvented, or discarded by the upper class and everyday people; and the ways in which these technologies have been a cause and effect of change in African societies.

A product of this theme is his ongoing book project, provisionally entitled Power and the People: Electricity and Urban Life in Twentieth-Century Nigeria. The book analyzes the evolution and impact of electrification in Nigerian cities from its inception in 1898, through independence (1960), the Civil War (1967-1970), and to the eve of the OPEC-led international oil boom in the early 1970s. It makes original contributions to studies of colonial and post-colonial investments in infrastructure, colonial and post-colonial development, technology and modernity, regulation and privatization, urbanism, and energy inequality.

Adebayo holds a Ph.D. in History from the University of Cambridge, where he was a Cambridge-Africa Scholar (2016-2020). His research has been generously supported by many grants and fellowships, including the IEEE Life Members’ Fellowship in the History of Electrical and Computing Technology and the Melvin Kranzberg Fellowship awarded by the Society for the History of Technology. Adebayo obtained a BA degree in History from the University of Ibadan, Nigeria, where he was a Grace Leadership Foundation Scholar; and an MA degree from the Graduate Institute, Geneva, Switzerland, as a Hans Wilsdorf Foundation Scholar.

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