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Omoniyi Adekanmbi ’04 (New Carrollton, Md.) can offer detailed descriptions of characters with names like Patchneck Red and explain that anyone going to a railroad or a crossroads is likely to have a supernatural experience. She gained this knowledge by collaborating with Samuel Hay, visiting professor of government and law, to research and examine the works of Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright August Wilson.
Adekanmbi, a psychology major and Africana Studies minor, is examining each of Wilson’s seven published plays plus the unpublished manuscript of an eighth as part of an EXCEL Scholars project. In EXCEL, students are paid a stipend for their work, and many of the 160 students who participate each year go on to publish papers in scholarly journals and/or present their research at conferences.
Wilson wrote his plays about the African-American culture as experienced by the descendants of slaves. The result of this research will be a concordance of the playwright’s works.
“They all take place in Pittsburgh and incorporate many of the same characters,” Adekanmbi says, explaining that Wilson, whose ninth play, Gem of the Ocean, is touring the United States, plans to have written a play for each decade of the 20th century.
“There are a lot of things I never really understood about the African-American experience,” Adekanmbi says, explaining that her parents are from Nigeria and Jamaica and she spent four years of her childhood living in Nigeria. She says she’s learning a great deal from the plays as she examines each line for a variety of elements, including themes, characteristics, ideas, beliefs, changes in setting, extraordinary events, and attitudes.
Hay plans to publish the concordance after Wilson publishes Gem of the Ocean and a tenth, as-yet unfinished play.
Hay, an award-winning playwright himself, as well as author and one of the leading scholars on black drama in the United States, says he chose Adekanmbi for the research after her stellar performance in his African Cultural Institutions class in the fall of 2002.
“She’s very detail-oriented and very bright,” he says. “I wanted her to develop the skills of reading a work, isolating issues, and then finding a framework for the issues.”
Adekanmbi’s work with Hay is the latest in a string of research experiences, including another EXCEL project last spring in which she examined human perception of human and animal forms, and an independent study last fall in which she explored the gap in test scores between black and white students.
This fall, she plans to begin a senior honors thesis that examines self-handicapping among minority students as a cause for the “achievement gap.”
Adekanmbi says her research experiences at Lafayette have helped prepare her for graduate school, where she plans to focus on academic disengagement among minorities. She hopes to eventually teach in inner-city schools and write books.
“I’ve had many opportunities at Lafayette and I’ve done pretty much everything that I could do,” she says, adding that working with Hay has been especially interesting. “It’s exciting to be included in something that will be published.”
A graduate of Parkdale High School, Adekanmbi is member of NIA, a women’s organization that celebrates ethnicity, gender, and sisterhood. She’s also co-president of Association for Lafayette Women; a member of Association of Black Collegians, Students for Social Justice, Questioning Established Sexual Taboos, the Justice, Tolerance, Ecology residential floor, and Psychology Club; and serves as a psychology laboratory assistant, a student representative for the Admissions Office, and a volunteer at the Easton Area Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.
In the past, she has participated in the Lafayette African and Caribbean Students Association, the Dining Committee, and the Creating Harmony And Necessary Cultural Equality living group, and volunteered for the English as a Second Language program.