Mathew Ayodele

Mathew Ayodele is a fourth-year PhD candidate in African History who is also pursuing a PhD minor in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. His research explores the intersections of religion, science, medicine, gender, and knowledge production in the late-nineteenth and twentieth-century West Africa, with a particular focus on Nigeria. Ayodele's dissertation draws on history, anthropology, botany, art history, and digital humanities to investigate the competitive and deeply entangled interactions among African healers, medical missionaries, European scientists, and Western-trained African doctors within the Nigerian medical landscape. He investigates how indigenous healers, once widely recognized for their therapeutic expertise in the nineteenth century, were later rivaled and nearly displaced by other medical regimes. His work also explores how twentieth-century Nigerian publics and institutions consistently deemed indigenous healing as peripheral to standardized medical practices such as biomedicine, and how these perceptions continue to shape the contemporary medical landscape in Nigeria and across West Africa. 

Ayodele's research has been supported by the Stanford Center for African Studies (CAS), the King Center on Global Development, the Stanford History of Science Program, the Huntington Fellowship, and the West African Research Association Fellowship (WARA). He has presented at various conferences, including the Lagos Studies Association (LSA), the Society for the History of Technology (SHOT), and the African Studies Association (ASA-US). He organized a panel on Health and Migration at LSA in June 2025. One of his ongoing works received a top Paper Prize at the 2024 WARA/UC Berkeley West Coast Conference on West Africa. He recently designed and taught "Disease and the Making of West African Cities, 1860–2020" as an instructor. Ayodele is presently conducting extensive archival and oral history research in Nigeria, the United Kingdom, and the United States for his dissertation.