Premium Times columnist, Pius Adesanmi, honoured in Canada (PHOTOS)

On November 1 in Halifax, Canada, renowned Premium Times Columnist, Pius Adesanmi, was officially awarded the 2017 Board of Director’s Leadership Award of the Canadian Bureau for International Education (CBIE).

The High Commissioners of Nigeria and South Africa to Canada were in Halifax to share the professor’s moment.

The award ceremony was the highpoint of the CBIE’s 2017 Annual Conference and was attended by close to 1000 delegates from Canadian Universities and other higher education stakeholder sectors. Mr. Adesanmi’s award is in recognition of the impact of his work in postgraduate research capacity development in African Universities, notably in Ghana, Nigeria, and South Africa.

For nearly a decade, Mr. Adesanmi has worked in African countries to groom the next generation of researchers in the humanities and the social sciences by training PhDs, postdocs, and early-career lecturers in interdisciplinary conversations and methodology. He has served for five years as faculty and consultant to the University of Ghana’s Pan-African Doctoral Academy, an annual summer school for doctoral students from the West and East African subregions.

During his sabbatical in Ghana in 2013-2014, he designed a brand new PhD programme in African Thought for the Institute of African Studies at the University of Ghana. He is also the Associate Director of the Abiola Irele School of Theory and Criticism, an annual summer training school for Nigerian lecturers at the Kwara State University. In South Africa, he works with the University of Johannesburg and Wits University to train and mentor doctoral and postdoctoral students in interdisciplinary research methods.

In 2010, Mr. Adesanmi won the inaugural Penguin Prize for African Writing with his book, You’re Not a Country, Africa. The Penguin Prize was initiated by Penguin Books in conjunction with Chinua Achebe. Mr. Adesanmi is the Director of Carleton University’s Institute of African Studies, the only such Institute in any Canadian University.

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