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Onookome Okome
Onookome Okome is Professor of African Literature and Cinema at the Department of English and Film Studies, University of Alberta, Edmonton. He was educated at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria where he earned the BA (Hons), MA and Ph.D. in Theatre and Cinema Studies. He taught at the University of Calabar, Nigeria from 1989 to 2002 when he moved to the Department of English and Film Studies of the University of Alberta, Canada. One of the foremost scholars on Nollywood and a frontline intellectual of African popular culture, Dr. Okome had travelled widely and has given lectures in the United States, Canada, Israel, Ghana, Switzerland, Germany, Belgium and Holland. He has published several books, including Ogun's Children: The Literature and Politics of Wole Soyinka Since the Nobel and Writing the Homeland: The Poetry and Politics of Tanure Ojaide.
In 1997, he co-published Cinemas and Social Change in West Africa with his friend and long time collaborator, Professor Jonathan Haynes of Brooklyn College, Long Island, New York. In 1998 they published the first serious attempt at theorizing Nollywood, which appeared in Research in African Literatures. Since then, Dr. Okome has published over twenty essays and edited special issues of journals on Nollywood, including a special issue in Film International which appeared in 2007.