Nigerian professor Wale Adebanwi has won the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship, awarded based on prior career achievement and exceptional promise.

Mr Adebanwi, the Presidential Penn Compact professor of Africana Studies and director of the Centre for Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, U.S., is among the 188 winners of the 2024 awards.

The board of trustees of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation said in a statement that the fellowship covered a “distinguished and diverse group of culture-creators working across 52 disciplines.”

“Humanity faces some profound existential challenges,” said the foundation’s president, Edward Hirsch, in the statement on Friday.

“The Guggenheim Fellowship is a life-changing recognition.

It is a celebrated investment into the lives and careers of distinguished artists, scholars, scientists, writers and other cultural visionaries who are meeting these challenges head-on and generating new possibilities and pathways across the broader culture as they do so,” Mr Hirsch added.

Mr Adebanwi previously served as the first African to be appointed as the Rhodes professor of Race Relations and director of the African Studies Centre at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom.

Mr Adebanwi, a prolific author, holds a PhD in Political Science from the University of Ibadan and another PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Cambridge, where he was a Bill and Melinda Gates Scholar.

His books include ‘The Nigerian Press and the Politics of Meaning’, ‘Authority Stealing: Anti-Corruption War and Democratic Politics in Post-Military Nigeria’, and ‘Yoruba Elites and Ethnic Politics in Nigeria: Obafemi Awolowo and Corporate Agency’.

Since its founding in 1925, the Guggenheim Foundation has awarded over $400 million in fellowships to more than 19,000 fellows.

The fellowship is among the world’s most prestigious awards, and this year alone had over 3,000 applicants.

Fifty-two scholarly disciplines and artistic practices are represented in four broadly considered categories: the natural sciences, social sciences, humanities, and creative arts. 

(NAN)