Sunday Okobi with agency report
A Nigerian scholar, Professor Wale Adebanwi of the University of Pennsylvania(UPENN), United States, has emerged one of the 188 scholars to win the Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation awards.
The Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation had just announced winners of its 2024 prestigious awards after months of a rigorous peer review of a long list of about 3,000 candidates. Out of the lots, 188 world-class scholars, scientists, writers, historians, artists and photographers came top.
Adebanwi, who made the enviable list, teaches in the Department of Political Science and the Department of Africana Studies, where he is the current director.
Before he was headhunted by UPENN, he taught at the University of California-Davis and University of Oxford where he was the first African ever to be appointed as the Rhodes Professor of Race Relations and Director of the African Studies Centre.
Adebanwi holds a doctorate in Political Science from the University of Ibadan and another Ph.D in Social Anthropology from the University of Cambridge,where he was a Bill and Melinda Gates Scholar.
His works/books include: ‘Authority Stealing: Anti-Corruption War and Democratic Politics in Post-Military Nigerian; ‘Yoruba Elites and Ethnic Politics in Nigeria: Obafemi Awolowo and Corporate Agency’ and ‘The Nigerian Press and the Politics of Meaning.
He has also edited and co-edited several books with Professor Ebenezer Obadare and other scholars. According to the organisers of the awards, the awardees will be given funds to support their work.
