Thrilled to announce that I have been awarded a 2022 Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship.
The fellowship supports doctoral students in the humanities and interpretive social sciences with a year of funding to facilitate the completion of projects that will form the foundations of their scholarly careers. This program is made possible by a grant from the Mellon Foundation and administered by the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), the leading representative of American scholarship in the humanities and interpretive social sciences.
We are proud to announce that Olanrewaju Lasisi has been recognized as one of fifty exceptional awardees, selected from a pool of over 800 applicants. Each fellow will receive an award to support the final year of dissertation research and writing. In addition, fellows will participate in a professional development workshop to help prepare them for postdoctoral career opportunities within and beyond the academy.
Olanrewaju Lasisi’s research explores how the practice of space mirrors the practice of power politics in the pre-Atlantic and Atlantic Ijebu kingdom of Southwestern Nigeria. It combines the ritual dramas on the palace ground, centered within the capital city, with oral traditions, early European travel accounts, and archaeological excavations to shed light on the interactions between the sixteen third-class kings at the frontier, with the paramount ruler at the capital city. The interaction helps to understand the roles played by the Ijebu kingdom and its geographic positioning in the second millennium AD. Particularly, it sees the palace complex as the microcosm of the landscape of power, combining architecture, ritual, and astronomy in its layout. This layout becomes the foundation for its political, economic, and ritual practices.
“ACLS is excited to support this diverse cohort of promising emerging scholars as they pursue research that will help us gain a more complete understanding of our world, from Ijebu-Yoruba palatial architecture in the second millennium CE to contraceptive technologies and their relationship to population growth in mid-twentieth century Mexico,” said ACLS President Joy Connolly. “We are proud to partner with the Mellon Foundation to help build a more just and inclusive future for the humanities and social sciences.”
Stay updated with information about this and other ACLS fellowship and grant competitions.
OLANREWAJU LASISI 