Nigerian Academic Olutayo Adesina Awarded Global Professorship Worth $1 Million USD

The Global Professorships of the British Academy are substantial awards led by investigators. They aim to bring globally acclaimed scholars to the United Kingdom to carry out innovative, coherent, and groundbreaking research projects. Each project, funded up to £900,000 by the Academy, spans up to four years.

The current group of Global Professors will conduct research on a variety of topics, such as creating innovative food system models for societal benefit and investigating the history of West African communities through museum collections.

Olutayo Charles Adesina is a history professor at the University of Ibadan. His research focuses on West Africa’s economic history, the history of development, and Nigerian history. He is the author of “Nigeria in the Twentieth Century: History, Governance and Society” (2017) and is in the process of finishing a comprehensive manuscript on “The Indian Diaspora in Nigerian History, Economy and Political Power Relations.”

Adesina’s project under the Global Professorship, titled “The Town and Gown Interface: Ibadan and the Decolonisation of Social Knowledge in the 20th Century,” has been granted £879,117. He will collaborate with the University of Manchester for this project.

Here’s a brief description of his project:

During the 1950s, the University College Ibadan (UCI) sparked a historiographical revolution that significantly influenced the development and expansion of the Nigerian nation-state. This revolution marked an early example of knowledge decolonization. The project investigates how UCI, a hub of academic, social, intellectual, and political activity, addressed the concerns and realities of the general public. It explores the extent to which the work of academic historians and social scientists at UCI was influenced by indigenous, vernacular epistemologies. The city of Ibadan had a unique cultural and intellectual identity. For the first time, this project examines the interaction of nationalist historiography, academic social science, and vernacular knowledge as mutually constitutive social epistemologies. The project involves an in-depth study of key works in history and related disciplines such as sociology, anthropology, ethnomusicology, language and literature, along with extensive interviews and fieldwork in the city of Ibadan, Southwest Nigeria.

We extend our hearty congratulations to Adesina on this significant accomplishment!