Dr. Omolade Ilesanmi | Discourse Studies | Research Excellence Award

Lecturer II at McPherson University | Nigeria

Omolade Mayokun Ilesanmi is a scholar of English language and discourse studies whose research interrogates the interactions among media discourse, identity, humour, gender, sexuality, and protest communication within contemporary Nigerian and African sociocultural spaces. Her work draws on critical discourse analysis, multimodality, pragmatics and sociolinguistic approaches to uncover how ideology, power and representation shape public narratives across digital platforms, popular culture and mediated communication. She has published in international peer-reviewed outlets such as African Identities, Sexuality & Culture and Comedy Studies, offering innovative insights into youth activism, queer-related humour, digital resistance, stand-up comedy as social commentary, and media portrayals of social actors. Her research spans the discursive framing of protest movements, multimodal representations of conflict, narrative constructions of single motherhood in film, and the pragmatic functions of humour in shaping public perception. She also investigates the linguistic dynamics of online matchmaking shows, identity negotiation in digital spaces and the cultural politics embedded in comedic performance and digital storytelling. Her published and ongoing works contribute to expanding discourse-analytic perspectives on African media ecologies, marginalised identities and socio-political communication. She has authored a book chapter with a global academic publisher and maintains an active publication pipeline with several manuscripts under review in respected journals. Her emerging scholarly impact is reflected in a citation record of 13 citations, an h-index of 1, and an i10-index of 1, demonstrating a steadily growing research footprint. Through collaborative and individual scholarship, she continues to advance interdisciplinary conversations in discourse studies, gender and sexuality studies, and digital communication.

Profiles: Google Scholar | LinkedIn | ResearchGate

Featured Publications

Osisanwo, A., & Ilesanmi, O. (2023). Gender, ethnic and class as humour strategies in stand-up comedy of Bovi, Kenny Blaq, Akpororo and Basket Mouth. Comedy Studies, 14(1), 20–35.
(Cited by: 12)

Ilesanmi, O., & Osisanwo, A. (2024). Discursive tropes of aggression against queer-sexuality in Nigerian standup comedy. Sexuality & Culture, 28(6), 2860–2878.
(Cited by: 1)

Ilesanmi, O. (2026). Multimodal representation of herder-farmer conflicts in selected Nigerian online cartoons. In Conflict and representation in online communication (pp. 169–200).

Ilesanmi, O. (2025). Discursive tropes of youth activism in the tweets of virtual #EndSARS protesters. African Identities, 1–21.