Carleton University’s Pius Adesanmi, professor of English and African Studies and noted poet and critic has been named a Carnegie Diaspora Visiting Professor. He will spend time in Ghana working on a project funded by Carnegie Corporation of New York with the aim of harnessing the expertise of Africa’s diaspora-based intellectuals for the development of universities across Africa. Adesanmi will visit the Kwame Nkrumah Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana at Legon, for one year.
“Although I’m now in Accra, Ghana’s capital city and settling down to work, it still hasn’t sunk in yet,” says Adesanmi. “When you win a slot in the highly-competitive Carnegie Corporation’s Diaspora Fellows Program and the Carnegie Corporation sends you to one of the most prestigious and biggest research universities in Africa, it takes time for it to sink in. In addition to the Penguin Prize for African Writing, which I won in 2010, I see this as another privileged opportunity to fly Carleton University’s flag on the international stage.”
“Professor Pius Adesanmi is one of the most versatile, thoughtful and creative minds among a new generation of African scholars in the humanities,” said Tade Aina, program director, Higher Education in Africa, Carnegie Corporation of New York. “He combines superb training in literary and critical studies with a language proficiency and immersion in different literary traditions that you find only in the works of scholars like Prof. Abiola Irele and Prof. Kole Omotosho. Like both of them, he is a public intellectual and more like Kole Omotosho, he is breaking the barriers of both medium and genre.”
About Carnegie Corporation of New York
Andrew Carnegie created the Carnegie Corporation of New York in 1911 to promote the advancement and diffusion of knowledge and understanding. In keeping with this mandate, the corporation’s work focuses on the issues that Andrew Carnegie considered of paramount importance: international peace, the advancement of education and knowledge and the strength of democracy.
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