Wednesday, October 08, 2008

Ebenezer Obadare, assistant professor of sociology at the University of Kansas, has been named the seventh Sherman Emerging Scholar by the Department of History at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. An expert on the politics and societies of post-colonial Africa, Obadare was selected for this honor through a national competition of junior scholars.

"A Sherman Emerging Scholar is someone whose research is highly relevant to the current global situation and who is able to put important international issues into a meaningful historical context," said Taylor Fain, a faculty member in the UNCW Department of History and chair of the Sherman committee. "Dr. Obadare's work on the post-colonial African state system certainly makes him an exceptional young scholar."

Obadare will deliver a lecture titled, "Africa Between the Old and the New: The Strange Persistence of the Post-Colonial State" at 7:30 p.m., Thursday, Oct. 16 in the Warwick Center Ballroom on the UNCW campus.

The lecture, which is free and open to the public, will be followed by a reception in the lobby of the Warwick Center.

The topic of Obadare's lecture is the present state of post-colonial Africa and the re-invention of African civil society following the end of imperial rule. The borders of Africa were drawn by Europeans with no regard for the interests of the African peoples, yet they have been surprisingly durable. Obadare's lecture will assess why this system is still largely in place today.

"If there is a story that is more compelling than the social, political and economic crisis which has ravaged African society for the better part of the last half-century, it is the continued resistance of those individuals and groups which, for the most part, have borne the brunt of this same crisis," said Obadare of his research. "Convinced of the usefulness of studying these responses for understanding social life in Africa, I am investigating how these various groups, who occupy different locations in African society and often in the face of seemingly insuperable odds, engage in strategies of resistance."

Obadare completed his doctoral dissertation on "The Theory and Practice of Civil Society in Nigeria" at the London School of Economics and Political Science in April 2005, receiving the Department of Social Policy's Richard Titmuss Prize for Best Doctoral Thesis. He has been a Ford Foundation International Fellow and a co-recipient of a Macarthur Foundation Research and Writing grant for a project on migration and transnational resource flow in Nigeria. His publications on civil society, religiosity, citizenship and youth in Africa have appeared in the leading Africanist journals, including The Journal of Modern African Studies, Review of African Development, and Politique Africaine.

For more information about the Sherman Emerging Scholars lecture series and to view a video interview with Obadare, go to www.uncw.edu/hst.

Media contact:
Dana Fischetti, media relations manager, 910.962.7259 or fischettid@uncw.edu