Wendell Nii Laryea Adjetey
Ph.D., (Yale University, 2018)
M.Phil., (Yale, 2015)
M.A., (Yale, 2015)
M.A., (University of Toronto, 2009)
Honours B.A. (University of Toronto, USMC, 2008)
North America (including Caribbean)
Africa
Thursdays 15:00 -16:00pm
By Appointment
Wendell Nii Laryea Adjetey (Nii Laryea Osabu I, Atrékor Wé Oblahii kè Oblayéé Mantsè) 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 revolutionary Black organizing and state repression in the United States and Americas, 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 as dedicated to teaching as he is to research. He is the recipient of McGill University's H. Noel Fieldhouse Award for Distinguished Teaching, and the Principal's Prize for Excellence in Teaching. 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.
Selected Awards and Honours:
William Dawson Chair, 2022
Distinguished Influencer Award, University of Toronto African Alumni Association, 2022
Austin B. Creel Trust Award, Yale University, 2016
Edla J. McPherson Fellow, Yale University, 2016
Dr. Edward Alexander Bouchet Graduate Honor Society, 2015
Selected Fellowships and Grants:
SSHRC Insight Development Grant, 2022-2023
W. L. Mackenzie King Fellowship, Harvard University’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, 2018-2019
Visiting Research Scholar, Princeton University (regretfully declined), 2019-2020
Visiting Scholar and Pre-Doctoral Fellow, MIT, 2017-2018
Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation, 2014-2018
Visiting Scholar and Senior Resident Fellow at Massey College, University of Toronto, 2016-2017
Marcus Garvey Foundation, 2016
Echoing Green Global Fellowship, 2015-2017
German Historical Institute, 2015
Social Science and Policy Forum, University of Pennsylvania, 2013
Selected Journal Articles:
“Bridging Borders: African North Americans in Great Lakes Cities, 1920s–1940s,” Journal of American History, 110, no. 1, (2023).
“In Search of Ethiopia: Messianic Pan-Africanism and the Problem of the Promised Land, 1919–1931,” Canadian Historical Review, 102, no. 1, (2021).
Edited Volumes:
Founding Editor
“Preface to Winks’s The Blacks in Canada: A History”
“Petitioning Power: Canadian Racial Consciousness Meets Alabama Injustice, 1958” in M. Johnson and F. Aladejebi (eds.), Unsettling the Great White North (UTP, 2022).
Selected Lectures:
“‘Follow the North Star to Canada’: Draft Resisters and the Underground Railroad,” Shannon Lecture, Carleton University, November 2023
“Cross-Border Cosmopolitans and Cold War Counterrevolution,” Canadian Studies, UC Berkeley, October 2023
“Father, Son, and Holy Malcolm: Gender and Cold War anti-Black Counterinsurgency in North America,” Homecoming Lecture, McGill University, October 2023
“In the Wake of Black Power: Arms Smuggling, Revolution, and Counterrevolution in the Atlantic World,” Center for the Study of Africa and the African Diaspora, NYU, November 2022
“1919: The Year of the Revolutionary Black Messiah,” Keynote, Rare Books and Special Collections, McGill University, February 2022.
“The Great Paradox: Chattel Slavery in North America,” Annual Invited Slavery and the Law Lecture, Faculty of Law, McGill University, October 2021.
Conferences:
Convener: “Pluralism in a Historical Context: Challenges and Opportunities in North America,” Harvard University, December 2019.