Two Nigerian professors win UK’s Global Professorships awards

Two Nigerian academics have been named among the eight recipients of the United Kingdom’s Global Professorship awards.

Professor Olutayo Adesina and Professor Abubakar Sule Sani were among the 2023-2024 cohort of the award by The British Academy.

Olutayo Adesina, awarded £879,117 grant, is a professor of history in the Department of History and former director of the Centre for General Studies at the University of Ibadan.

Abubakar Sule Sani, given £892,037.31 grant, is a professor and former head of the Department of Archaeology and Heritage Studies at Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria.

They will conduct their research at the University of Manchester and the University of East Anglia respectively.

The academy said the Global Professorship scheme is aimed at fostering collaboration between international researchers and universities in the UK.

Professor Adesina’s research is titled, “The Town and Gown Interface: Ibadan and the Decolonisation of Social Knowledge in the 20th Century”.

Professor Sani is exploring “Looking Forward, Looking Back: Past and Present West African Communities Revealed through Museum Collections”.

Professor Adesina’s work focuses on the role the University College Ibadan (now the University of Ibadan) played in the “evolution and growth of the Nigerian nation-state.”

The research would seek to answer the question: how did the academic, social, intellectual, and political beacon at UCI address the concerns and realities of ordinary people?

“My vision for this Global Professorship is an innovative programme of research that will invigorate academic collaborations between the UK and Nigeria/West Africa and become a model for future engagement based on trust, co-production of knowledge and intellectual integrity,” Professor Sani said of his research.

“I aim to achieve this by combining archaeology, museum practice and stakeholder engagement to study large and under-researched collections from key Nigerian sites, drawing on archaeological, ethnographic and archival data held in British and Nigerian museums.”

The Ahmadu Bello University scholar said his research will bring new understandings of African history, and of UK/Nigerian research histories, through academic outputs, online resources, exhibitions and outreach in the UK and Nigeria.