Meet the Nigerian professors awarded £1.7 million in grants by British Academy

Nigerian professors, Olutayo Adesina and Abubakar Sani, were awarded £1.7 million in research grants by the British Academy in the UK to undertake research projects on Nigeria’s historical and cultural domain.

Adesina and Sani, along with eight other professors from across the world, were announced as recipients of the British Academy Global Professorships Award, which aims to foster collaboration between leading international researchers and UK-based institutions.

Who is Olutayo Adesina?

Olutayo Charles Adesina is a Professor of History in the Department of History at the University of Ibadan (UI), Nigeria, and the president of the Society of Nigerian Archivists (SNA).

Adesina started his academic career as a Teaching Assistant at the Obafemi Awolowo University (OAU), Ile-Ife in 1989, and has since accumulated over 35 years of research and teaching experience.

He earned his PhD from the Department of History, OAU, Ile-Ife, Nigeria, and has served as the Centre for General Studies Director at UI.

Throughout his academic career, he has authored and co-authored more than a dozen books and over sixty articles. His research interests are in the fields of West African economic history, with a focus on Nigeria.

Adesina is a Fellow of the Nigerian Academy of Letters and serves as a resource person and international panel of scholars working for the African Humanities Programme of the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS).

His professorship research is titled “The Town and Gown Interface: Ibadan and the Decolonisation of Social Knowledge in the 20th Century,” which will explore the connection of nationalist history, academic social science, and local knowledge, through extensive interviews and fieldwork in the city of Ibadan in Southwest Nigeria.

He received £879,117 and will work with the University of Manchester during his study, which is to begin this year.

Who is Abubakar Sani?

Abubakar Sule Sani is a Professor of Archaeology at the Department of Archaeology and Heritage Studies, Ahmadu Bello University (ABU), Zaria, in North Central Nigeria, where he was a former Head of Department (HOD).

Sani’s research interests are in settlement history, material culture, and socio-political development of northern Nigeria over the last millennium, which he has been studying of over 27 years.

He is also interested in the protection of Nigeria’s heritage and has written about it.

During his professorship, Sani will draw on archaeological, ethnographic, and archival data held in British and Nigerian museums to study large and under-researched collections from key Nigerian archaeological sites.

He titled his study “Looking Forward, Looking Back: Past and Present West African Communities Revealed through Museum Collections,” which according to him 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.”

Sani received £892,037 for his research project with the University of East Anglia.

He says the project will have a transformative impact on his research and that of the Univesity, “while helping remedy current post-colonial issues concerning the role and value of museum collections.”

Other recipients of the Global Professorship Award include Tetyana Antsupova from Ukraine, Paul Behrens and Sandrine Berges from the UK, Karine Chemla from France, Saloumeh Gholami from Germany, and Ayelet Landau from Israel.