Wendell Nii Laryea Adjetey

Wendell Nii Laryea Adjetey (Nii Laryea Osabu I, Oblantai Mantse, Atrekor We) is Assistant Professor of post-Reconstruction U.S. and African Diaspora history and William Dawson Chair.

Dr. Adjetey is working on his second and third book projects on warfare and African-led abolitionism on the Gulf of Guinea Coast, and gender and messianic Black revolutionary leadership in the United States, respectively.

Dr. Adjetey’s first monograph is Cross-Border Cosmopolitans: The Making of a Pan-African North America (UNC Press, Jan. 2023). It situates fundamental questions of twentieth-century U.S. history—immigration, civil rights, racial identity, revolution, counter-revolution, imperialism, and neo-colonialism—within a diasporic North American and transatlantic frame. Cross-Border Cosmopolitans is the result of a major transformation of Dr. Adjetey’s Ph.D. dissertation, which won Yale University’s Edwin M. Small Prize for “outstanding” contribution to U.S. history, Sylvia Ardyn Boone Prize for African American Studies, the Canadian Studies Prize, and the Willard “Woody” Brittain, Jr. Award.

Dr. Adjetey is also a prize-winning instructor. He received the Faculty of Arts H. Noel Fieldhouse Award for Distinguished Teaching in May 2022. His undergraduate lecture courses and seminars cover U.S., African American, African Canadian, African Diaspora, and global history. He offers graduate seminars on various topics.

Before arriving at McGill in August 2019, Dr. Adjetey held the W. L. Mackenzie King Fellowship at Harvard University’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs and Department of History Lectureship. His research has garnered prizes and fellowships from many sources: SSHRC, the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation, University of Pennsylvania, Yale, and Princeton, to name a few. In 2017-18, he was Visiting Scholar and Pre-Doctoral Fellow at MIT, and in 2016-17, Visiting Scholar and Senior Resident Fellow at Massey College, University of Toronto.

Selected publications, lectures and conferences:

“Bridging Borders: African North Americans in Great Lakes Cities, 1920s–1940s,” Journal of American History (forthcoming 2023).

“In Search of Ethiopia: Messianic Pan-Africanism and the Problem of the Promised Land, 1919–1931,” Canadian Historical Review, 102, no. 1, (2021).

“Petitioning Power: Canadian Racial Consciousness Meets Alabama Injustice, 1958” in M. Johnson and F. Aladejebi (eds.), Unsettling the Great White North (UTP, 2022).

“1919: The Year of the Revolutionary Black Messiah,” Keynote, Rare Books and Special Collections, McGill University, February 2022.

“Cold War Hot Wars: Arms Smuggling, Revolution, and Counter-Revolution in the Atlantic World,” Keynote, McGill University History Colloquium, April 2022.

“The Great Paradox: Chattel Slavery in North America,” Annual Invited Slavery and the Law Lecture, McGill University Faculty of Law, October 2021.

Convener: “Pluralism in a Historical Context: Challenges and Opportunities in North America,” Harvard University, December 2019.