Beatrice Abisola Akinsiku

(Beatrice) Abisola Akinsiku (she/her) is a Ph.D. student in English (Literature) focusing on Women's Literature and its digitization. Previously, she attended Joseph Ayo Babalola University, Nigeria, where she received her bachelor's with honors and served as a GTA. She completed her master's degree in English (Literature) at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville with distinction. In the fall of 2019, Abisola received the Competitive Graduate Award, which allowed her to research the history of female fiction writing in Nigeria, starting with Flora Nwapa. She found that some of the fictional texts self-published by first, and second-generation Nigerian women writers are gradually going into extinction; they need to be recovered and digitally preserved. Her scholarly interests include African women's literature, digital humanities, gender studies, and Black literature. Her master's thesis focuses on the representation of blackness in selected African diasporic texts written by women of Nigerian descent. In her thesis, she shows how contemporary African women writers are extending the frontiers of their narration to capture the diasporic experience in the twenty-first century, thus providing context for the experiences of women migrants as they move from the global South to the global north. Abisola plans to continue teaching after completing her doctoral degree.