Gbenro Adesina/Ibadan
The Alexander von Humboldt Foundation has awarded a grant to University of Ibadan Professor of English, Aderemi Raji-Oyelade, to organise a conference, the Humboldt Kolleg in the Humanities in Nigeria, for the year 2018.
The Humboldt Kolleg under the theme – “Of Texts, Spaces, Signs and Symbols: Questing Corpora for Translational Research in the Humanities” – is scheduled to take place in Ibadan from February 19 to 22, 2018.
A total number of 23 Humboldtians, 10 junior researchers and eight senior non-Humboldtian researchers have been confirmed for the special international conference. They are drawn from universities and research institutions across Nigeria, and from Kenya, Tanzania, Togo, Zimbabwe, Senegal and Germany.
The sub-themes of the conference include fieldwork in text and cultural productions, new speech acts and identity constructions and subversions, challenges for new humanities scholars and the values and limitations of scholarship in the humanities.
Among UI scholars slated for the Humboldt Kolleg are Prof. Akinola Odebunmi, Prof. Herbert Igboanusi, Dr. Chukwuma Okoye, Dr. Aderemi Ajala, Prof. Obododinma Oha, Prof. Ademola Dasylva, Prof. Oka Obono, Prof. CBN Ogbogbo, Prof. Ayo Ojebode and Prof. Isaac Olawale Albert.
UI Vice-Chancellor, Prof. Abel Idowu Olayinka, himself a distinguished Humboldtian, is the host of the special conference while the Nigerian Humboldt Ambassador, Prof. Clement Odunayo Adebooye, will give strategic support to the conference.
It is expected that the interaction of scholars in cognate fields of the Humanities and across different African universities and countries will bring about beneficial networking and lasting intellectual collaboration over time.
Chatting with the magazine, Raji-Oyelade said, “This conference grant is generally a routine award by the AvH to assist scholars interact and network for greater collaboration. It is as prestigious and as competitive as the Alumni Award which I have been lucky to win recently.
I am more delighted to be in a position to convene this unique conference of Humanities scholars from Nigeria, Germany, Togo, Zimbabwe, Tanzania, Kenya and Senegal.
This is an opportunity to inspire a new generation of literary scholars, linguists, historians and social scientists who will query received concepts and create new ideas for development in their various disciplines”.
Recently, Raji-Oyelade won the Humboldt Alumni Award 2017 for Innovative Networking Initiatives.