PhD, Alberta
MA, Ibadan
BA, Calabar
Extension: 40501
Email: pugor@uwaterloo.ca
Biography
I grew up in Obudu, a small town in Cross Rivers State, Nigeria and completed my B.A. in Theatre Studies at the University of Calabar in 1996 and an MA in Theatre and Film at the University Ibadan in 2001. I earned my Ph.D. from the University of Alberta in 2009, specializing in African and Postcolonial/World Literatures. My main areas of research and publishing are modern African literature and film, Nollywood cinema, African youth cultures, and Black popular culture. Currently, I am working on a monograph focusing on the screen media output of Nigeria’s leading film director and TV producer, Femi Odugbemi. I am also working on two edited volumes on the Postcolonial Bildungsroman (with Arnab Roy of Florida Gulf Coast University) and Narratives of Transitional Justice in World Literatures (With Bonny Ibhawoh of McMaster University). My research interests in general are concerned with new social processes in global politics, economy, information and communication technologies, cultural representations and everyday life, and the new social responses which these activities elicit from the public domain, especially from marginalized groups like racial minorities in the global north, youth, women, and disenfranchised subjects in postcolonial settings.
Selected publications
Books
Roy, Arnab & Ugor, Paul (Eds). The Postcolonial Bildungsroman: Narratives of Youth, Representational Politics and Aesthetic Reinventions. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press (Spring 2025).
Arnab Dutta Roy, Paul Ugor & Maria Puleo, Simone (Eds). The Postcolonial Bildungsroman and the Character of Place. St. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press (Fall 2025).
Paul Ugor (Ed.). Youth and Popular Culture in Africa: Media, Music and Politics. New York: African Studies Series, University of Rochester Press (November, 2021).
Paul Ugor and Lord Mawuko-Yevugah (Eds). African Youth Cultures in the Age of Globalization: Challenges, Agency and Resistance. Surrey, UK: Routledge, 2017/Ashgate 2015.
Journal Special Issues
Paul Ugor and Adrienne Cohen (Eds.). “Youth, African Popular Arts and Cultural Politics in Everyday Life.” Special Issue of Critical African Studies. 15:2, 2023. 125-133. Link: https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rcaf20/15/2.
Paul Ugor (Ed). Contemporary Youth Cultures in Africa. Special Issue of Postcolonial Text. Vol. 8, No 3&4, 2013 [Published March 31st 2014). Link: http://postcolonial.org/index.php/pct/issue/view/44.
Poyntz, Stuart, Paul Ugor, and Jacqueline Kennelly (Eds.). Youth, Cultural Politics and New Social Spaces in an Era of Globalization. Special Issue of Review of Education, Pedagogy and Cultural Studies 31:4, (September 2009). Link: http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/gred20/31/4?nav=tocList.
Selected Book Chapters and Journal Articles
“Critical Theory and the Global Civic Imagination: Ethics and the Reconstitution of Citizenship in Decolonial Thought.” Africa Today 70.4. (Summer 2024). 3-22. https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/52763.
“The Treasonous State and Postcolonial Precarity: Femi Odugbemi’s Makoko as ‘Victim Documentary’.” Special Issue of Journal of African Cinema. Ed. Sada Niang & Shiela Petty. Forthcoming, Fall 2024.
“Archiving Africa: Notes for the Contemporary African Filmmaker,” Black Camera: An International Film Journal 14, no. 2 (Spring 2023): 144–171.
“Imaginaries of Truth and Reconciliation: Nation and Narration in Antjie Krog’s Country of My Skull.” Truth Commissions and Statebuilding. Eds. Bonny, Ibhawoh, Jasper Ayelazuno & Sylvia Bawa. University of McGill Press (Fall, 2023).
Grants, fellowships, and awards
- Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC). “TRANSFORM: Engaging with Youth for Social Change.” $2.5-million Partnership Grant. In partnership with Prof Claudia Mitchell, Faculty of Education, University of McGill. June 2024.
- Outstanding College Researcher, College of Arts and Sciences, Illinois State University, November, 2022.
- National Humanities Center Fellowship, Research Triangle, North Carolina. September 2021-May 2022.
Current research
I am currently working on a new book-length project that focuses on the aesthetic and philosophical dimensions of the cinema of Femi Odugbemi, renowned Nollywood film director and TV producer. Nollywood cinema emerged in Nigeria in the early 1990s as an artisanal film industry created by unemployed urban youth seeking alternative avenues to eke out a living and to document and bear witness to the vicissitudes of life amidst the insufferable conditions brought about by the imposition of harsh neoliberal economic policies by international financial institutions on developing countries in the mid-1980s. Tentatively entitled Afropolitan Humanism: Popular Cinema and Humanist Advocacy in Nigeria, the book project aims to chronicle, in a contextual and historically sensitive way, the humanitarian uses to which Odugbemi has put his screen media work as a socially-committed Nollywood filmmaker. I’m particularly interested in exploring the multiple unique ways in which he has deployed film and television technologies as political tools to interrogate and challenge a decadent postcolonial political and socio-cultural order that is marked by cruelty, contemptuous of human life and the other precious resources needed to sustain it. Part of the wider argument I make about Odugbemi’s cinematic oeuvre as a director-auteur is that his screen media output as a whole is indicative of a well-established tradition of what Hans Richter has referred to elsewhere as a “socially responsible cinema” in Nollywood film production, which has rarely been acknowledged by African film scholars and other commentators on Nollywood.
Areas of graduate supervision
- Modern African Literature
- African Cinema/Nollywood
- Black Popular Culture
- Cultural Theory
- African Youth Studies
- Postcolonial Anglophone World Literatures