News

By Special Correspondent, CMU

The University of Dar es Salaam scholar, Dr. Thomas Biginagwa, has won a prestigious one-year new Visiting Bye-Fellowship  (Global South) at the University of Cambridge, United Kingdom, one of the world’s leading universities and research centres.

According to the information received by UDSM, the Fellowship is hosted by Gonville & Caius College, University of Cambridge, and is designed to support one researcher in any field of study who holds an academic appointment and has done advanced research and produced significant published work.

Dr. Biginagwa, a senior lecturer in the Department of Archaeology and Heritage Studies, College of Humanities (CoHU), becomes the first scholar to receive this fellowship to carry out his research project free from other commitments from October 2023 to October 2024. 

“The purposes are to permit the scholar to execute the project, to enable the scholar to engage in intellectual exchange with Cambridge scholars, and to form connections that might be of longer-term benefit to their own careers and to their own institutions”, stated the information about the fellowship.

Now a Cantabrigian, Dr. Biginagwa, who is very pleased to obtain this opportunity, says he would be “working to reconstruct the changing ecological footprints of diverse human activities in the western Serengeti ecosystems over the last 2000 years”.

“This project seeks to inform biocultural conservationists on how these ecosystems have been evolving and to help with the projection of future transformations due to climate and societal change scenarios”, said Dr. Biginagwa.

Dr. Biginagwa is very grateful to the University of Cambridge for selecting him to this valuable academic opportunity and remains equally thankful to the University of Dar es Salaam for supporting him abundantly towards achieving this.

Dr. Biginagwa has just been endorsed by the British Academy as a Global Talent Scholar. The British Academy is the UK’s national academy for the humanities and social sciences that mobilises these disciplines to understand the world and shape a brighter future. ​

Dr. Biginagwa holds a doctorate from the University of York  (UK), and his broad research interest is in historical ecology, seeking to understand how contemporary landscapes, habitats, and cultures were shaped by changing human-environment interactions after the incorporation of East Africa into the North Atlantic trade system after c. 1500 AD.