Overview
Yinka Adetu is a Ph.D. student in the Department of English at Cornell University. His research examines the intersections of trauma, memory, and mobility in African and Global South diasporic literatures, with particular attention to how displacement and histories of violence reconfigure personal and collective identities across transnational spaces. His broader interests include Anglophone postcolonial studies, trauma and memory studies, African and African diasporic literatures, and cultural/transnational studies..
Adetu earned his B.A. and M.A. in Literature-in-English from Lagos State University, Nigeria. His master’s dissertation—forthcoming as a co-authored article in CLAREP Journal of English and Linguistics (Vol. 7)—analyzes how trauma and migration intersect to construct postcolonial subjectivity in African child migrant narratives, particularly in the life writings of authors who left the postcolony during childhood.
For his doctoral research, Adetu is exploring the complexities and paradoxes of trauma in Global South diasporic experiences. His work is engaging psychoanalysis and postcolonial trauma theory to investigate how traumatic memory is temporally and spatially dislocated, how it circulates beyond its immediate historical framework, and how it shapes contemporary cultural and social formations.
Research Focus
- Trauma (Postcolonial) Theory
- African and African Diaspora Literatures
- Global South Literatures
- Trauma/Memory Studies
- Anglophone Postcolonial Literatures