’BioDun Ogundayo, associate professor of French and comparative literature at Pitt–Bradford, has received a Fulbright U.S. Scholar Award to study, teach and research in Burkina Faso, a country in West Africa.
Ogundayo, who is the director of Africana studies and foreign languages at Pitt–Bradford, will spend the 2022-23 academic year teaching in the Department of Anglophone Studies at the Université Joseph Ki-Zerbo in Ouagadougou, the capital of the West African nation.
“I will be bringing a relevant and specifically American cultural, academic and cross-cultural input and perspective to their curriculum,” Ogundayo said. He hopes to connect his Pitt-Bradford students with his new students in Burkina Faso through the videoconferencing platform Zoom as well.
When not teaching, Ogundayo plans to conduct research on how the oral traditions of the country’s dominant ethnic group, the Mossi, shape Burkinabe attitudes, conversations and responses to the challenges of Islamist fundamentalism and violence facing the country.
Ogundayo has published on African spirituality, ethics and modern African politics, the African American experience and the African diaspora and has long been interested in the myriad of cultures that are part of the African diaspora.
At the University of Pittsburgh, he is involved with the University Center for International Studies and the Center for African Studies, and designed and managed Pitt–Bradford’s undergraduate certificate in African Studies. He plans to use what he learns in Burkina Faso to contribute to the University’s curriculum, diversity initiatives and Center for African Studies.
Ogundayo is uniquely qualified for these studies, in part because of his fluency in English, French and dialects of several West African languages. A native of Nigeria, he attended boarding school in Ghana some 100 miles south of Ouagadougou.
Ogundayo has taught at Pitt-Bradford since January 2001. He earned his doctoral degree in French and Francophone literature and cultures at the State University of New York at Buffalo, a master of arts in French from Queen’s University in Canada and a master of arts and bachelor of arts in French from the University of Lagos in Nigeria. He also studied for a master’s degree in International Management at Whitworth University in Spokane, Wash.