Like other historians of her generation, Bolanle Awe started her academic career with a PhD dissertation. Her thesis examined the emergence of Ibadan as the most militarized state in nineteenth-century Yorubaland. Besides the history of Ibadan, she produced scholarly works on oral history and traditions among the Yoruba. Although the importance of oral history as source material was an article of faith for the leading Nigerian historians of the 1960s and 1970s, Awe and E. J. Alagoa are among the few historians who critically deploy oral tradition in studying specific aspects of Nigerian history.

Awe is also a pioneering historian of Nigerian women. Aside from teaching and writing about women, her single most cherished contribution to Nigerian studies is the role she played in the establishment of the Women's Research and Documentation Center (WORDOC), the first resource center for research on women's and gender studies in Nigeria. As the first chairperson of WORDOC, Awe worked to organize symposia, raise funds, and create research networks and collaboration among scholars (both local and international) of women's and gender studies in order to establish a firm beginning for the center. She actively participates in the activities of associations and institutions aimed at improving the social and economic status of women in Africa and remains a strong advocate of African women's political, social, and economic empowerment.