As the sole faculty member in Carleton’s Institute of African Studies, Nduka Otiono brings his knowledge of the African continent into many other disciplines.
Now, Professor Otiono will be taking that expertise in interdisciplinary dialogue to Delta State University in Nigeria, as a winner of the prestigious Carnegie African Diaspora Fellowship.
“The Carnegie African Diaspora Fellowship will provide me a much-needed platform to further actualize my dream of contributing in a more sustainable fashion to intellectual capital development in Africa,” says Professor Otiono, who will spend the summer in Nigeria. “I will be actively engaging in curriculum co-development as well as graduate student mentoring and training.”
Otiono will collaborate with G.G. Darah, professor of English and president of the Nigeria Oral Literature Organization (NOLA), to launch a working group for researching the oral literature, folklore and folk life of Delta State and beyond. He will also develop short professional seminars on interdisciplinary research methods for graduate students and early career faculty, and initiate a new interdisciplinary graduate course, Globalization and Popular Culture in Africa.
As a Diaspora African scholar, Professor Otiono has dedicated his work to “turning Africa’s huge brain drain into brain gain”. He subscribes to the idea of the “organic intellectual”: someone who extends their intellectual work to the continent “through regular visits, conferences, and independent and collaborative research on a broad range of projects with colleagues in the continent.”
The Carnegie African Diaspora Scholar Fellowship pairs African diaspora scholars with higher education institutions in Africa. Professor Otiono is one of 17 scholars who have been awarded fellowships to travel to Africa beginning in spring 2015 to conduct a wide range of projects, including developing an MBA program, staging a musical based on South African themes and Africa-sensitive research in cognitive psychology.
“Both Carleton University and I will benefit from the collaboration for my future academic research and pedagogical development, especially as an early career academic,” notes Otiono. “Also, the level of involvement that Delta State University has had in the process up to this point coheres with the vision for international exchanges which I hope to come out of this project,” he concludes.
