Congratulations to Dr. Ademide Adelusi-Adeluyi for the prestigious African Studies Association Book Award!

Congratulations to Dr. Ademide Adelusi-Adeluyi, Associate Professor in the Department of History, whose amazing book: Imagine Lagos: Mapping History, Place, and Politics in a Nineteenth-Century African City won the prestigious African Studies Association Book Award!

Written from a digital humanities perspective, her book uses historical sources, maps, and walking cartography to offer new ways of seeing nineteenth-century Lagos, West Africa’s most populous city.

It explores the traces people leave in the places where they live and die, rebuilding Lagos’s past through encounters between men and women, past and present, enslaved and free, land and lagoon. Imagine Lagos argues that the making, erasing, and remaking of spatial markers—streets, markets, squares, palaces, and lagoons—shaped negotiations over identity, power, and freedom. Drawing on oral and archival sources and three summers of walking the city, the book challenges views of Lagos as a blank, deteriorating space and instead offers visual and textual narratives that help readers imagine the old city.

Historical maps, colonial records, missionary letters, praise poetry, and newspapers form a collage of urban life, revealing streets as sites of memory. Adelusi-Adeluyi’s maps of mid-nineteenth-century Lagos show layers of change and help illuminate everyday life between 1845 and 1872—when the streets still held their histories.