Kanyinsola Obayan Arigi

Faculty Lead, Africa General Program

Email: kobayan@wharton.upenn.edu  |  Phone: 215-898-1215

Dr. Kanyinsola Obayan Arigi is the Faculty Lead of the Africa General program at the University of Pennsylvania’s Lauder Institute, where she teaches courses on contemporary Africa. As an interdisciplinary scholar of Africa, her primary intellectual interests lie at the intersection of three broad areas: return migration, transnationalism, and diaspora; political economy of neoliberalism, entrepreneurship, and development; and socio-cultural and political economy implications of emergent technologies and digital cultures in Africa.

Dr. Arigi received her B.A. in International Relations and Global Studies, as well as in African and African Diaspora Studies with Honors from The University of Texas at Austin. She received her Ph.D. and M.A. in Africana Studies at Cornell University in 2019 and 2017, respectively, and was a Mellon postdoctoral fellow in Digital Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Her research has received distinguished recognition, including awards from the West African Research Association, the Fulbright-Hays GPA, and the Association of Computing Machinery. Her work has been published by Routledge Press, ABC-CLIO, and the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing. She is currently working on her first book project that investigates how Nigerian technological actors and innovators fashion new subjectivities and redesign the cityscape to reimagine the nation’s future and demonstrate African worldliness and inventiveness.