Blurb:

Oludamini Ogunnaike (b. 1986) is a Nigerian-born American Associate Professor of African religious thought and Democracy at the University of Virginia. Having completed his undergraduate studies in Cognitive Neuroscience and African Studies at Harvard University and earned the distinction of Summa Cum Laude, he went on to do graduate work at Harvard, obtaining his PhD in African Studies and the Study of Religion in 2015. Before taking up his current position at the University of Virginia in 2019, Ogunnaike was a postdoctoral fellow in Islam in Africa at Stanford University and then Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the College of William and Mary. Ogunnaike is author of several books, one of which, entitled Deep Knowledge: Ways of Knowing in Sufism and Ifa, Two West African Intellectual Traditions, was awarded a prestigious First Book Prize by the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora. In addition to his numerous publications in the fields of Africana philosophy, Sufi poetry, and Islamic thought are a series of highly creative projects which explore links between philosophy and the creative arts, particularly poetry, fiction, and film. Today, Ogunnaike is widely recognized as a leading voice in a variety of disciplines, from cross-cultural and decolonial philosophy on the one hand, to the Islamic and indigenous religious traditions of West and North Africa on the other. This entry is a transcript of an interview conducted with Professor Ogunnaike in the fall of 2023. It explores Africana philosophy in all of its complexity, and situates it in the emerging field of global philosophy along the way.