I am Ayodele James Akinola, and most people call me James. I hold a Ph.D. in Rhetoric, Theory and Culture from Michigan Technological University and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Ibadan in Nigeria.

My two doctorates came out of very different rooms. At Ibadan, I recorded and analyzed consultations between neurologists and their patients to understand how diagnosis, trust, and care get negotiated in talk. At Michigan Tech, I turned to the internet and studied how online reviews work as a rhetorical genre, drawing on Baudrillard’s account of hyperreality to ask how platforms build the version of a place that travelers expect to find.

What connects the two is a question I keep returning to: how do ordinary people use language to make sense of experiences that matter to them, and what do institutions and platforms do to that language along the way?

Today I lead the American Center for Interdisciplinary Research, teach at the University of Indianapolis, and live in the Indianapolis area. I also co-founded the Network for Digital Humanities in Africa and the Digital Humanities Association of Nigeria.