Bode Omojola

Bode Omojola is the Hammond-Douglass Five College Professor of music. He studied music composition at the University of Nigeria before proceeding to Leicester University, England, where he obtained a Ph.D. in Music. Prior to his appointment at Mount Holyoke College and the Five College Consortium, he taught in Nigeria and held several prestigious research positions, including Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute fellowship in musicology and the Alexander von Humboldt fellowship in music at the University of Cologne, Germany. His research focuses on the musics of West Africa and the Black Diaspora, while his thematic concerns include intercultural aesthetics, Africanist performance practices and creative ethnomusicology. His publications include Yoruba Music in the Twentieth Century: Identity, Agency and Performance Practice (University of Rochester Press, 2012) and Nigerian Art Music (French Institute for Research in Africa, 1995). In 2019, Omojola won the Meribeth E. Cameron Faculty Award for Scholarship. Omojola has directed the African Opera Series at Mount Holyoke College since its inception in 2008. His most recent opera Odyssey of a Dream was premiered in April 2018 by the Mount Holyoke Symphony Orchestra and Five College African opera students.