The Alexander von Humboldt Foundation has announced Professor Aderemi Raji-Oyelade as a winner of the Humboldt Alumni Award 2017 for Innovative Networking Initiatives.
A statement by the General Secretary of the Foundation, Dr Enno Aufderheide, stated that “This award shall give you the opportunity to implement your proposed networking initiative as well as contribute to support sustainable academic and cultural relations between Germany and your home country and to strengthen the regional alumni network. I would like to offer my congratulations on this exceptional achievement.”
The award ceremony takes place in June 2017 during the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation’s Annual Meeting in Berlin. Funding for the award is being provided by the German Foreign Office.
Raji-Oyelade, who is the immediate past Dean of Faculty of Arts of the University of Ibadan, has volumes of poetry which have been translated into French, German, Catalan, Swedish, Ukrainian, Latvian and Hungarian include: Webs of Remembrance (2001), Shuttlesongs America: A poetic guided tour (2003), Lovesong for My Wasteland (2005), Gather My Blood Rivers of Song (2009) and Sea of My Mind (2013).
The foundation, it was gathered, grants up to four Humboldt Alumni Awards per year to promote innovative networking initiatives of alumni of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation’s fellowship and award programmes. It is designed to support initiatives not covered by the Foundation’s existing sponsorship and alumni programmes and to promote academic and cultural relations between Germany and the Humboldt Alumni’s own countries and strengthen their collaboration in the respective regions.
Remi Raji’s award-winning project is entitled “Postproverbial Africa: Building a Corpora of Wits in Texts, Media and Performance”, a trans-national initiative which brings African scholars in the humanities together with the ultimate aim of contributing to the body of modern and radical proverbs which are created mainly in urban communities almost all over the African continent.
Remi-Raji, an orator and a poet is a Salzburg Fellow and visiting professor at a number of institutions including Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville, the Universities of California at Riverside and Irvine, University of Cape Town, South Africa, and Cambridge University, UK. His scholarly essays have published in journals including Research in African Literatures and African Literature Today. Remi Raji who served as the Writer to the City of Stockholm, Sweden in 2005 had read his poems widely in Africa, Europe and America.
Remi Raji, a chieftain of the Association of Nigerian Authors, ANA, was the former publicity secretary, Vice Chairman, and chairman of the Oyo State chapter, 11th president of the association, served as the Year 2000 Editor of the ANA Review, the official journal of the association. He was also the former National Coordinator of the resuscitated Nigerian PEN Centre.
Culled from www.thenewsnigeria.com.ng
