Who Is Saheed Aderinto? Nigerian Author Who Won The Dan David Prize

Saheed Aderinto, a Nigerian author and a Professor of History and African Diaspora Studies at Florida International University, has won the Dan David Prize.

Described as the ‘largest history prize in the world’, the Dan David Prize is a major international award that recognises and supports outstanding contributions to the study of history and other disciplines that shed light on the human past.

Each year, the Dan David Prize awards up to nine prizes of $300,000 to outstanding early and mid-career scholars and practitioners in the historical disciplines.

The 2023 Dan David Prize winners were selected from hundreds of nominations submitted by colleagues, institutions and the general public in an open nomination process.

Finalists were chosen by a global committee of experts that changes annually.

Nine emerging scholars of history from around the world were winners of the 2023 prize award, with the winner announced in a ceremony held Tuesday, February 28th 2023.

According to the Dan David Foundation, Mr Aderinto has been selected as one of the nine winners who will receive $300,000, each, in recognition of their outstanding scholarship in the historical discipline.

With a total monetary prize of $2.7 million, the Dan David Prize “recognises outstanding scholarship that illuminates the past and seeks to anchor public discourse in a deeper understanding of history,”.

Recipients must be engaged in “outstanding and original work related to the study of the human past, employing any chronological, geographical, and methodological focus.” They “should exhibit strong potential for future excellence, innovation, and leadership that will help shape the study of the past for years to come.”

While the Prize winners “must have completed at least one major project, the prize is not given for that project, but rather in recognition of the winner’s overall achievements as well as their potential for future excellence,”.

The Washington Post described the Dan David Prize as “the new MacArthur-style ‘genius grant’ for history.” Selection is by nomination.

The awards ceremony will be held in Israel in May.

The selection committee commended Mr Aderinto’s work “for situating African history at the cutting edge of diverse literatures in the history of sexuality, nonhumans, and violence, noting that it is exceptional to see a single person leading scholarship in all of these fields,”.

The other 2023 winners include Ana Antic from the University of Copenhagen, Karma Ben Johanan from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Elise Burton from the University of Toronto, Krista Goff from the University of Miami, Stephanie Jones-Rogers from the University of California Berkeley, Anita Radini from the University College, Dublin, Mirjam Brusius from the German Historical Institute in London, Bartow Elmore from Ohio State University and Tyrone Freeman from Indiana University and Purdue University.

Who Is Saheed Aderinto?

Saheed Aderinto is a Nigerian-American professor of History and African and African Diaspora Studies at Florida International University and an award-winning author.

Aderinto made headlines after winning the Dan David Prize in 2023, described as “the largest history prize in the world”.

Aderinto is the first and only Nigerian to be awarded the prestigious Dan David Prize.

The Nigerian professor was born in Ibadan on January 22, 1979. He is 44 years old.

Aderinto completed his elementary school education at Adeen International School in 1990 and secondary school at Ibadan City Academy in 1996.

He then went on to earn a BA in History from the University of Ibadan in 2004.

Saheed Aderinto moved to the United States in 2005 to study at the University of Texas at Austin, where he received his MA in History in 2007 and a PhD in African History in 2010.

In the fall of 2010, he started his teaching career at Western Carolina University, Cullowhee NC. In Fall 2022, Aderinto started a new position as a Professor of History and African and African Diaspora Studies at Florida International University.

Lagos Studies Association

Aderinto spearheaded the foundation of the Lagos Studies Association (LSA) in 2017. He is credited as the Founding President alongside Professors Abosede George of Barnard College, New York and Ademide Adelusi-Adeluyi of the University of California, Riverside.

The idea for the formation of the body occurred in May 2016 when Aderinto co-organized a conference on Lagos at Barnard College.

Participants at the conference noted the significance of having an organization to harmonize the works of academic and non-academic practitioners of Lagos. They suggested the formation of the LSA.

In spring of 2017, Aderinto led the establishment of the LSA as “an international, interdisciplinary organization of academic and non-academic practitioners whose interest focus on Lagos and its peoples.”

The LSA organizes the annual Lagos Conference held in Lagos (Nigeria) and holds panels at international conferences of the African Studies Association of the United States and the African Studies Association of the United Kingdom.

Saheed Aderinto Profile

Saheed Aderinto’s profile at his University, the Florida International University reads: Professor Saheed Aderinto, Founding President of the Lagos Studies Association, is the author of Animality and Colonial Subjecthood in Africa: The Human and Nonhuman Creatures of Nigeria (Ohio University Press/New African Histories Series, 2022), Guns and Society in Colonial Nigeria: Firearms, Culture, and Public Order (Indiana University Press, January 2018), and When Sex Threatened the State: Illicit Sexuality, Nationalism, and Politics in Colonial Nigeria, 1900-1958 (University of Illinois Press, 2015), which won the 2016 Nigerian Studies Association’s Book Award Prize for the “most important scholarly book/work on Nigeria published in English language.”

Professor Aderinto has edited and co-edited a number of books, and his work has appeared in leading Africanist and specialist journals including, the Canadian Journal of African Studies; Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History; Journal of the History of Sexuality; Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History; History in Africa: A Journal of Method; Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies; Africa: The Journal of the International African Institute; the Journal of Social History; and the Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, among others.

Currently, Professor Aderinto is writing a book and making a documentary about the history of Fuji, an African music and popular culture.

In choosing him for their prize, the Dan David Foundation noted: “Dr. Saheed Aderinto is a historian who uses unusual lenses such as s*xuality, guns, animals and music to reexamine colonial identity and subjecthood in modern Africa, with a particular focus on Nigeria. He is a Professor of History and African and African Diaspora Studies at Florida International University.

“Aderinto’s work challenges historians to think about what constitutes the past in completely new ways, to ask new questions about the makers of history and to question conventional assumptions about power, agency and authority. He aims to recalibrate conventional definitions of sources used to reconstruct African history.”

Saheed Aderinto contact

The Nigerian professor, Saheed Aderinto can be reached on:

Office: DM 385B

Phone: 305-348-2328

Email: [email protected]

Personal Website: https://www.saheedaderinto.com/

Saheed Aderinto CV

Download Saheed Aderinto’s CV below…

aderinto.cv_Download

Publications

Aderinto has published eight books, thirty-six journal articles and book chapters, forty encyclopedia articles, and twenty book reviews.^[4]

• Animality and Colonial Subjecthood in Africa: The Human and Nonhuman Creatures of Nigeria (Ohio University Press/New African Histories Series, 2022).

• Sports in African History, Politics, and Identity Formation (New York: Routledge, April 2019), co-edited with Michael Gennaro.

• Guns and Society in Colonial Nigeria: Firearms, Culture, and Public Order (Indiana University Press, January 2018) 0253031613.

• African Kingdoms: An Encyclopedia of Empires and Civilizations (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2017), edited 1610695798.

• When Sex Threatened the State: Illicit Sexuality, Nationalism, and Politics in Colonial Nigeria, 1900–1958 (University of Illinois Press, 2015) 0252080424.

• Children and Childhood in Colonial Nigerian Histories (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), edited 1137501626.

• The Third Wave of Historical Scholarship on Nigeria: Essays in Honor of Ayodeji Olukoju (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012), co-edited 1443839949.

• Nigeria, Nationalism, and Writing History (University of Rochester Press, 2010), co-authored 1580463584.

Source: Nigeriabombshell.com