News

By Dotto Kuhenga, Communication and Marketing Office,

Four University of Dar es Salaam Lecturers have won the prestigious 2022 African Humanities Program (AHP) Fellowships, granted by the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), that enable them to undertake postdoctoral research in their fields.

The selected UDSM academics (and their departments) include Dr.Richard Nandiga Bigambo (Archaeology and Heritage Studies); Dr.Cyprian Kilangi (Foreign Languages and Linguistics)   Dr.Neema Eliphas Laizer (Literature); and Dr.Anitha Tingira (Sociology).

The news on the selection, which was released on the ACLS website on 30th August, 2022 names the four UDSM lecturers among the 41 new African Humanities Program (AHP) Postdoctoral Fellows who will ‘join a robust international network of past awardees in this program supported by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and administered by ACLS’.

“ACLS is proud to award this outstanding, final cohort of African Humanities Program Postdoctoral Fellows. We look forward to our continued collaboration with this vibrant community of esteemed fellows, scholars, and mentors as they transition into the African Humanities Association”, said ACLS President Joy Connolly.

Connolly further said that the AHP has provided vital support for hundreds of humanistic scholars, and advanced the production and circulation of humanistic scholarship across Ghana, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania, and Uganda—and around the world.

According to the ACLS fellowship news, the new 2022 AHP Postdoctoral Fellows represent a wide range of academic institutions in Ghana, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania, and Uganda.

“Their research topics include the impact of postcolonial forces on Ugandan applied theatre practices; an ethnographic examination of COVID-19 vaccination experiences in Tanzania; the history of environmental pollution and regulation in the Zambian Copperbelts; and language, masculinity, and victimhood in contemporary Nigerian fiction”, stated the ACLS news.

With regard to the four fellows from UDSM, Dr.Kilangi’s area of study is ‘an interpretive phenomenological analysis of indigenous language practice and transmission by parents in inter–ethnolinguistic families while Dr.Bigambo’s research is: singing for the future? exploring traditional songs as a community-based approach in safeguarding wedding ceremonies.

Meanwhile, Dr.Laizer studies ‘emerging perspectives on reconfiguring 'Maasainess'’, and Dr.Tingira deals with ‘acceptance and hesitancy to vaccinate: an ethnographic examination of COVID-19 vaccination experiences in Tanzania.'

Formed in 1919, ACLS is a nonprofit federation of 79 scholarly organizations and was founded to support the free circulation of knowledge, on the belief that deep understanding of human thought and action is a key part of creating a just and peaceful world. ACLS holds a core belief that knowledge is a public good.

ACLS strives to promote the circulation of humanistic knowledge throughout society and employs its $180 million endowment and a more than $30 million annual operating budget to support scholarship in the humanities and social sciences and to advocate for the centrality of the humanities in the modern world.