Before landing at Gavilan, I taught at UC Santa Cruz, the University of Ibadan in Nigeria and Vassar College. I have been doing research with extended families of drummers and dancers from Èrìn-Òsun, Nigeria for the past twenty years. Based on my fieldwork throughout the 1990s and the early 2000s, my ethnography, Yorùbá Bàtá Goes Global: Artists, Culture Brokers, and Fans, focuses on the role of collaboration in the production and marketing of traditional culture. As an anthropologist, I am interested in a variety of topics, including: the relationship between culture and power, globalization, human rights, social change, gender, body politics, performance, decolonization, social theory, diaspora studies, Yorùbá studies and Africa. My current research investigates the persistence and re-emergence of òrìsà-based practices through examining traditional amd Islamic intersections in Yorùbá popular culture in Nigeria.

I have been working with my colleagues in the Social Science department to develop our Social Science major. We have created two new majors: one with an emphasis in Community Studies and one with an emphasis in Global Studies. We have also launched and institutionalized Gavilan College's Service Learning Program in the Social Sciences. Aiming to facilitate effective participation by community college faculty in local and statewide dialogue about academic and professional matters, I served as president of Gavilan's Academic Senate for the past three years and am now serving as past president. Collaborating with colleagues at the state level, I have also served on the Future of California Higher Education Committee of the Academic Senate for California Community Colleges.

Education:

BA in Anthropology from Brown University
MA & Ph.D. in Anthropology from UC Santa Cruz