Note: Since the following story was published, Drs. Geiger and Otiono have also been featured in a Nov. 28th issue of Research Works.
Dr. Martin Geiger and Dr. Nduka Otiono are recipients of the prestigious Banting Postdoctoral Fellowships. They will both be at Carleton until the summer of 2014.
Martin Geiger is working with Dr. William Walters in the Department of Political Science. He spent four years at the Institute for Migration Research and Intercultural Studies’ (IMIS) at the University of Osnabrück (Germany) – one of Europe’s leading research centres on migration. Previously, he worked at other research centres, including institutes in Spain, Italy and Romania. In 2011, he came to Carleton as a Visiting Scholar in Residence affiliated with the Institute of European, Russian and Eurasian Studies (EURUS) and the Department of Political Science.
Geiger’s current research focuses on the industries developing and marketing information technologies for the use of managing human cross-border mobility. This research area has recently become central to the Canada-U.S. Smart Border Accords and similar initiatives in Europe. Geiger’s work scrutinizes the effects of new technologies on the management of cross-border mobility and international relations and by doing this, provides recommendations of how adverse effects and democratic concerns can be better addressed and mitigated. Some of his publications include: The New Politics of International Mobility. Migration Management and its Discontents and also The Politics of International Migration Management (both co-edited with A. Pécoud, A.), along with articles in several prestigious journals such as Hommes & Migrations, Migration Letters and Migrations Société.
Nduka Otiono is working with Prof. Pius Adesanmi at the Institute of African Studies. Heobtained his PhD from the University of Alberta where he won several awards, including the Izaak Walton Killam Memorial Scholarship. He was also nominated for the Governor General’s Gold Medal for academic distinction. He recently joined Carleton from Brown University, USA, where he held a one-year postdoctoral fellowship, worked closely with Chinua Achebe as Senior Research Assistant and was appointed a Visiting Assistant Professor. A fellow of the William Joiner Centre for War and Social Consequences, University of Massachusetts, Boston, his interdisciplinary research focuses on “street stories” or popular urban narratives in postcolonial Africa and how they travel across multiple popular cultural platforms such as the news media, film, popular music and social media. His research is informed by his background as a journalist and writer during the worst years of military dictatorship in Nigeria.
Otiono’s publications include scholarly essays in journals and books, as well as a volume of short stories, The Night Hides with a Knife, which won the ANA/Spectrum Prize; two volumes of poetry, Voices in the Rainbow, a finalist for the ANA/Cadbury Poetry Prize, and Love in a Time of Nightmares for which he was awarded the James Patrick Folinsbee Memorial Scholarship in Creative Writing. He is the co-editor of two anthologies: We-Men: An Anthology of Men Writing on Women (1998) and Camouflage: Best of Contemporary Writing from Nigeria (2006), and was founding editor of The Post Express Literary Supplement (PELS), and other literary supplements in Nigeria. He has been a member of the organizing committee of the annual Chinua Achebe Colloquium on Africa at Brown University, and also a member of the Board of Brown University’s Africana Film Festival.
The Banting Fellowships are awarded to top-tier Canadian and international postdoctoral researchers at an internationally competitive level of funding. They are named after Dr. Frederick Banting who discovered insulin, enabling people with diabetes to live long and healthy lives. More information on the Government of Canada Banting Fellowship can be found at http://banting.fellowships-bourses.gc.ca/about-a_propos/index-eng.html.