Double awards for Raji-Oyelade

RENOWNED poet and international scholar, Professor Aderemi Raji-Oyelade, has won the The Humboldt Alumni 2017 Award for Innovative Networking Initiatives.

The award, which was first announced in the last week of March, was two weeks later followed by another, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation award.

The information on the two awards coming within two weeks of each other from the same globally-recognised academic foundation represents further acknowledgement of the academic fecundity of the recipient.

The import of the second award, grants Professor Raji-Oyelade, who is on the staff of the University of Ibadan, Ibadan, opportunity to convene an international conference on humanities tagged the Humboldt Kolleg in the Humanities in Nigeria for 2018.

With the theme “Of Texts, Spaces, Signs and Symbols: Questing Corpora for Translational Research in the Humanities” the Humboldt Kolleg in the Humanities conference is scheduled to take place in Ibadan from February 19 to 22, 2018.

Commenting on the awards, Professor Raji-Oyelade said: “I must say that I was really surprised to receive the news of this second award. Since I had been named winner of the Humboldt Alumni Prize for Innovative Networking Initiatives, I least expected that my application for a Conference Award would be considered at all.

The conference grant is given 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. 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.”

A total number of 23 Humboldtians, 10 junior researchers and eight senior non-Humboldtian researchers drawn from universities and research institutions across Nigeria, Kenya, Tanzania, Togo, Zimbabwe, Senegal and Germany have been confirmed for the special international conference.

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.

The expectation of the sponsoring foundation is that the interaction of scholars in cognate fields of the humanities and across different African universities and countries.

This will bring about beneficial networking and lasting intellectual collaboration in the future.