Tolulope Adelabu

Tolulope Adelabu is a PhD student in the Department of African Cultural Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research connects children’s media, visual culture, and futurist literature to examine creativity under constraint. She studies how Africans have historically imagined futures through low-tech, playful, and collaborative media, and how these practices inform contemporary debates about knowledge production, authorship, circulation, automation, and emerging information systems.

She has an extensive multidisciplinary professional and academic background in information, literary, language, and education studies. She earned a Master of Library and Information Studies at UW-Madison and a joint honors master’s degree in English Literature and Education at the University of Lagos, Nigeria.

Before joining the graduate program, Tolulope was the 2021/2022 Fulbright Foreign Language (Yoruba) Teaching Assistant at the Department of African Cultural Studies (ACS) at UW-Madison. In addition to teaching a language class, she worked with the director of the African Languages Program to develop an interactive pedagogy dictionary model for African languages.

She currently works with is the African Studies Program (ASP) as a special assistant for web, communications, collections, and outreach management.