CLAS researcher named National Humanities Center Fellow

Chair of the Africana Studies Department Akin Ogundiran has been named a National Humanities Center Fellow for the upcoming academic year. He will join 36 other distinguished scholars from 32 institutions across the United States and eight foreign countries working on a wide array of projects as part of this competitive, prestigious fellowship program.

Through his award, Ogundiran will pursue a book project related to the cultural history of the Atlantic experience in the Yoruba hinterland (West Africa), circa 1550 to 1830. He is the second member of the UNC Charlotte faculty to be selected as a Fellow at the National Humanities Center.

According to Ogundiran, the study and book “will help broaden our understanding of the cultural history of the global Atlantic/early modern world by writing an African experience of early modernity into the Atlantic historiography and the anthropology of modernity. The book will place Africa at the center of the global history of modern world – that is as a co-originator of modernity rather than as a periphery of it.”

As a cultural historian, ethnographer and archaeologist, Ogundiran focuses his scholarly interests and publications broadly on emergent societies in Atlantic Africa and the African Diaspora during the past 700 years. These include the topics of community formation, landscape history, materiality, rituals, sacred grove and empire. He has written on historiography, black intellectual thoughts and cultural heritage issues, too.

Ogundiran is author, editor and co-editor of six books and has published more than 30 research articles and essays. His writings have appeared in African Archaeological Review, International Journal of African Historical Studies, International Journal of Cultural Heritage, Current Anthropology and American Historical Review, among others. His books include “Power and Landscape in Atlantic West Africa” and Materialities of Ritual in the Black Atlantic.”

His research has been supported by the Social Science Research Council, Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, National Endowment for the Humanities, Dumbarton Oaks, the Carnegie Foundation and the National Humanities Center, among others. His writings have been anthologized in several publications, including Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology. He is the recipient of 2006 University of Texas Africanist Award. In 2007, he received a Certificate of Special U.S. Congressional Recognition for Excellence in Service.

During summer 2015, using a fellowship from the Carnegie Foundation, Ogundiran will travel to Nigeria to collaborate on the development of the public exhibit “Sacred Groves and Green Sustainability in Nigerian Cities.” He will help plan three collegiate courses focused on the theme of sacred groves, resource management and sustainable environment. A virtual version of the exhibition also is planned as part of the project.