Saheed Aderinto

Bio

Professor Saheed Aderinto, a filmmaker and the Founding President of the Lagos Studies Association, is the author of “Animality and Colonial Subjecthood in Africa: The Human and Nonhuman Creatures of Nigeria” (Ohio University Press/New African Histories Series, 2022), “Guns and Society in Colonial Nigeria: Firearms, Culture, and Public Order” (Indiana University Press, 2018), and “When Sex Threatened the State: Illicit Sexuality, Nationalism, and Politics in Colonial Nigeria, 1900-1958” (University of Illinois Press, 2015), which won the 2016 Nigerian Studies Association's Book Award Prize for the “most important scholarly book/work on Nigeria published in the English language."

His current book project, “Fuji: The History of An African Popular Culture” is under contract with the University of Chicago Press. The first episode of his debut documentary film, “The Fuji Documentary,” premiered in February 2024. Since then, it has been screened at academic conferences, documentary film festivals, public spaces, and university campuses in Africa, Europe, and North America.

Critics, which include popular culture scholars, historians, and filmmakers, described The Fuji Documentary as “a landmark in popular music documentation,” “a must-see,” “powerful,” “trailblazing,” “an oratorical-historical masterpiece” by “a master of the subject and a brilliant visual narratologist.”

In 2023, Aderinto won the $300,000 Dan David Prize—the largest history prize in the world—in recognition of his “outstanding scholarship that illuminates the past and seeks to anchor public discourse in a deeper understanding of history.”

Personal Website: saheedaderinto.com