Wendell Nii Laryea Adjetey

Wendell Nii Laryea Adjetey (Nii Laryea Osabu I, Atrékor Wé Oblahii kè Oblayéé Mantsè) is Assistant Professor of post-Reconstruction U.S. and African Diaspora history and William Dawson Chair.

Dr. Adjetey is working on his second and third book projects on warfare and African-led abolitionism on the Gulf of Guinea Coast, and revolutionary Black organizing and state repression in the United States and Americas, respectively.

Dr. Adjetey’s first monograph is Cross-Border Cosmopolitans: The Making of a Pan-African North America (UNC Press, Jan. 2023). It situates fundamental questions of twentieth-century U.S. history—immigration, civil rights, racial identity, revolution, counter-revolution, imperialism, and neo-colonialism—within a diasporic North American and transatlantic frame. Cross-Border Cosmopolitans is the result of a major transformation of Dr. Adjetey’s Ph.D. dissertation, which won Yale University’s Edwin M. Small Prize for “outstanding” contribution to U.S. history, Sylvia Ardyn Boone Prize for African American Studies, the Canadian Studies Prize, and the Willard “Woody” Brittain, Jr. Award.

Dr. Adjetey is as dedicated to teaching as he is to research. He is the recipient of McGill University’s H. Noel Fieldhouse Award for Distinguished Teaching, and the Principal’s Prize for Excellence in Teaching. His undergraduate lecture courses and seminars cover U.S., African American, African Canadian, African Diaspora, and global history. He offers graduate seminars on various topics.