Professor Akin Odebunmi was born in Ogbomoso, Oyo State, Nigeria. He obtained his BA (Ed) and MA degrees in English from the University of Ilorin and took a PhD in English (Pragmatics) from the Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Nigeria. He took up an appointment with the University of Ibadan as a Lecturer Grade I in the Department of English in September, 2005, and rose to the rank of Professor of Pragmatics and Discourse Analysis in 2013 in the same university as a high flyer.
Professor Akin Odebunmi is, in the main, a specialist in Pragmatics and Discourse Analysis. He is specifically interested in Clinical Pragmatics, Linguistic Pragmatics, Critical Discourse Analysis and Literary Pragmatics. He has to his credit about 90 academic publications in local and international outlets in all the continents of the world. He has provided refereeing services for several international journals, some of which are Pragmatics and Society, Nordic Journal of African Studies, and Ghana Journal of Linguistics. Professor Odebunmi is an alumnus of the German Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship Foundation. He is currently the director of the University of Ibadan Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning. He is also the pioneer and incumbent national President of Pragmatics Association of Nigeria and the Interim Secretary of African Pragmatics Association with the headquarters at the University of Legon, Ghana.