Dr. Nikitta Dede Adjirakor
Short-Term Fellow
August 2025
Bio
Dr. Nikitta Dede Adjirakor holds a PhD in Literatures in African Languages from the University of Bayreuth, Germany. Her PhD project, titled “I Go for the Vibe: Hip-hop and Spoken Word as Aesthetic Practices in Dar es Salaam” introduced the framework of ‘vibe’ to investigate the hip-hop and spoken word as aesthetic practices through which people construct their everyday lifeworlds in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.
A Feodor-Lynen Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Dr. Adjirakor is now a Postdoctoral Fellow working on elegiac poetry in Ghanaian contemporary poetry networks, as well as examining digital literatures in African languages.
Her research broadly spans African literature, popular culture (especially hip-hop, spoken word, performance poetry), aesthetics, multilingualism, digital literature, fieldwork practices, and decolonial approaches to literary studies. She is especially interested in how language, style, and form generate meaning in multilingual and multi‐cultural African contexts, how performance spaces and digital media mediate identity, and how everyday aesthetic experience can illuminate lifeworlds.
She also founded Write Ghana Literary Initiatives, an organisation that promotes literature in indigenous Ghanaian languages by running writing prizes, workshops, and festivals.
Research
African Literature, Aesthetics, Multilingualism
Regions
West Africa, East Africa
Languages
English, Swahili, Ga
Books
I Go for the Vibe: Hip-hop and Spoken Word as Aesthetic Practices in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, PhD Thesis, University of Bayreuth.
Fieldwork Experiences and Practices in Africa (co-edited with Oladapo Opeyemi Ajayi, Hanza Diman, and Mingqing Yuan), University of Bayreuth, African Studies Working Papers 27, BIGSASworks 10!, 2021.
Articles
“Funding Popular Culture in Tanzania: Crowdfunding, Self-funding and the Live Performance as Fundraiser,” Routledge Handbook of African Popular Culture, edited by Grace Musila, Routledge, 2022, pp. 222-236.
“Fieldwork as Decolonising African Literary Studies: Researching Tanzanian Hip-hop and Spoken Word Poetry as a Ghanaian,” University of Bayreuth African Studies Working Papers, BIGSASworks!, vol. 27, no. 10, 2021,pp. 40-54.
“Constructing the African City through Hip-hop in ‘Nai ni ya who?’ by Muthoni the Drummer Queen,” Research in African Literatures, vol. 48, no. 1, 2017, pp. 116-134.
