Saheed Adejumobi, PhD, Associate Professor of History and African and African American Studies, Appointed to Pigott McCone Chair

The College of Humanities, Education and Social Sciences is pleased to announce that this summer, Interim Seattle University President Stephen V. Sundborg, S.J., appointed  Saheed Adejumobi, PhD, Associate Professor of History and African and African American Studies, as the Theiline Pigott-McCone Chair in Humanities. During his two-year appointment running from 2026 – 2028, Dr. Adejumobi will research and present on a new project entitled "In Defense of Black History, Modernism and Justice: W.E.B. Du Bois’s Art of Politics and Politics of Art."    

Adejumobi, who has been at SU since 2005 and has been integral to the development of the African and African American Studies Program, will facilitate a series of reading group seminars on Du Bois and Taylor as well as host a symposium on communities, the arts and social justice.  

The Theiline Pigott McCone Chair in Humanities is "dedicated to promoting scholarly life among faculty," according to the award description, and is bestowed on a faculty member who is "an outstanding teacher and scholar in one of the basic humanities disciplines." 

"I am thrilled that Dr. Adejumobi's work is being recognized with this prestigious appointment," says Monica J. Casper, PhD, Dean of CHESS. "I look forward to the important contributions this project will not only bring to the discipline, but also to our campus and broader community." 

Adejumobi's work as the Pigott McCone Chair will explore Black history, with a special focus on Seattle: Taylor, a University of Washington professor, was a leading scholar of Black history in the Western United States and the founder of BlackPast.org, a Du Bois-inspired online encyclopedia of Black history (you can read some of his writing on John Coltrane here). An expert on the work of W.E.B. Du Bois, Adejumobi was also a student of Taylor's at the University of Oregon, making him uniquely suited to lead the project.  

Dr. Adejumobi with Dr. Taylor 

"We live in disturbing times, yet this is also the opportunity to reassess the legacies of our past in the context of a communal appreciation of the legacies of both Du Bois and Taylor," says Adejumobi. 

“I believe that the that the reading seminars will also engage with some finer points in their scholarship and activism on issues such as feminism, social democracy, high and popular culture and the role of arts in the pursuit of justice.  These, I believe, should make for a more useful tribute than unbroken praise.” 

The project will include student-specific events that will provide SU students with opportunities to acquire and apply a critical appreciation for diverse cultural and intellectual traditions. He says that many of these events will draw from his extensive experience teaching in the African and African American Studies program at SU, including courses such as Black Social and Cultural Movements, Great Debates in African American History, and Empires and Utopias: Freedom and Justice in the African World and Jazz Modernism and History. 

One of the planned events is a two-year salon series, "Modernist Utopianism & Black Music.”  The salon will be a deep dive into how Black music has imagined, challenged, and built better worlds, with topics such as blues, jazz, funk, rock & roll, reggae, calypso, tropicália, hip-hop, and afrobeat.  

Adejumobi plans to include the Seattle community in the reading group seminars, offering a unique opportunity for community members to interact with students and faculty at SU, exploring Black history in Seattle and the Pacific Northwest through the lens of Du Bois and Taylor's work.  

In early 2027, Adejumobi will present the Pigott McCone Lecture, "W.E.B. Du Bois's Dialectical Humanism in the Age of Intelligent Machines," which will be followed by campus group readings of two classics: Myth, Literature, and the African World by Wole Soyinka and The Souls of Black Folk by Du Bois. 

"What is most exciting about Dr. Adejumobi’s project is its timely emphasis on W.E.B. DuBois as an iconic figure in Black history, culture, literary arts, and more," says Mary-Antoinette Smith, PhD, Professor of English and the previous Pigott McCone Chair.  
"Because of its interdisciplinarity, his theme is certain to attract a wide range of colleagues from History, African and African American Studies, English, Philosophy, Political Science, Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and others, who will be the beneficiaries of his wisdom and writings." 

The work is about meeting the moment, says Adejumobi: "Black history is being challenged, erased and rewritten with the goal of reinscribing some of the most pernicious white supremacist legacies derived from the trans-Atlantic slave trade and colonialism." 

"W.E.B. Du Bois and Quintard Taylor embody commitments to cosmopolitanism, democracy, and anti-imperialism as an inherent yet complicated American creed and heritage. The legacies of these scholar-activists bring into relief the systemic and everyday challenges to racial, class and gender supremacists at home and abroad." 

About: Dr. Saheed Adejumobi is the author of The History of Ethiopia (The Greenwood Histories of the Modern Nations Series) and has contributed to several books and publications on African, African American, and African Diaspora intellectual history, systems of thought, knowledge, and cultural production. Read more about his work here