By Damola Emmanuel
Three-term Head of the Department of History at the University of Ibadan, and current Director of the University’s Centre for General Studies,
The award is a big icing on the cake of Adesina, a Fellow of the Nigerian Academy of Letters, and easily one of the most celebrated Nigerian academics of all times, locally and internationally, who clocked 60 in February.
He wins the prestigious award for his monumental works in the fields of economic history of West Africa, history of development, and Nigerian history.
Another Nigerian in the elite list of awardees, which the Academy published on its website during the week, is Prof. Abubakar Sule Sani, a lecturer and former Head of Department of Archaeology and Heritage Studies at the Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria.
Announcing the awards, the Academy said the latest cohort of Global Professors “will undertake research on a range of diverse issues, including the development of novel food system models to benefit society and the exploration of West African communities’ history through museum collections.”
According to the British Academy, the Global Professorships scheme “aims to foster collaboration between leading international researchers and UK-based institutions on new and cutting-edge research projects,’ adding that:
Professor Adesina gave a brief synopsis of his area of focus during the period of the Global Professorship at the University of Manchester, entitled: The Town and Gown Interface: Ibadan and the Decolonisation of Social Knowledge in the 20th Century.
He wrote: “In the 1950s, the University College Ibadan (UCI) became the epicentre of a historiographical revolution that directly shaped the evolution and growth of the Nigerian nation-state, a movement that became an early instance of the decolonisation of knowledge. How did the academic, social, intellectual, and political beacon at UCI address the concerns and realities of ordinary people? To what extent was the work of academic historians and social scientists at UCI shaped by indigenous, vernacular epistemologies? The city of Ibadan had its own, rich and distinctive, cultural and intellectual identity. This project studies for the first time the interplay of nationalist historiography, academic social science, and vernacular knowledge as mutually constitutive social epistemologies. The project combines a close study of key works in history and related disciplines such as sociology, anthropology, ethnomusicology, language and literature with extensive interviews and fieldwork in the city of Ibadan, Southwest Nigeria.”
Other winners of the 2023-24 Global Professorships of the British Academy are: Professor Tetyana Antsupova, Professor Paul Behrens, Professor Sandrine Berges, Professor Karine Chemla, Professor Saloumeh Gholami and Professor Ayelet Landau.
