TheCable

Wale Adebanwi, a Nigerian scholar and professor of Africana studies at the University of Pennsylvania, United States of America, has been selected as one of the 188 fellows for the 2024 Guggenheim fellowship.

In a statement on Thursday, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation said the 2024 class is a cohort of a distinguished and diverse group of culture creators working across 52 disciplines. 

Established in 1925, the US fellowship celebrates the lives and careers of distinguished artists, scholars, scientists, writers and other cultural visionaries who are generating new possibilities and pathways across the broader culture.

“In all, 52 scholarly disciplines and artistic fields, 84 academic institutions, 38 US states and the District of Columbia, and four Canadian provinces are represented in the 2024 class, who range in age from 28 to 89,” the statement reads.

“More than 40 Fellows (roughly 1 out of 4) do not hold a full-time affiliation with a college or university. Many Fellows’ projects directly respond to timely issues such as democracy and politics, identity, disability activism, machine learning, incarceration, climate change and community. Since its founding in 1925, the Foundation has awarded over $400 million in fellowships to more than 19,000 fellows.”

Adebanwi, a professor of African studies, joins other fellows in architecture, music, applied mathematics, constitutional studies and many more fields.

The Nigerian professor obtained his first degree in mass communication from the University of Lagos. He got a master’s degree and a PhD in political science from the University of Ibadan. 

He also has a PhD in social anthropology from Cambridge University, United Kingdom (UK).

Adebanwi is also an author of various journals focusing on hot-button topics like ethnicity, nationalism, intellectual history, race, state and the media.