Workshops & Masterclasses

Date: 9^th of April 2018

Location: IFRA-Nigeria's library

On Monday, 9^th of April, IFRA was delighted to organise a workshop led by Dr. Vincent Hiribarren (King’s College, London), Lecturer in Modern African History at King’s College London. Last year, Dr. Hiribaren published A History of Borno: Trans-Saharan African Empire to Failing Nigerian State (Hurst Publisher, 2017), based on his PhD thesis and that he came to present in Ibadan. He has conducted archival and field research in various locations of Northern Nigeria, including Kaduna and Maiduguri, along with consulting colonial archives in Paris, London and Berlin. He has also a deep interest in cartography, as underlined in his personal website.

Date: 1^st of March 2018

Location: IFRA-Nigeria's library

On Thursday, 1^st of March, IFRA was happy to organise a seminar led by Dr. Sounaye Abdoulaye, research fellow at the Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO) of Berlin, Germany.

A religious studies scholar trained at Northwestern University (United States), Dr. Sounaye is a specialist of Islam, which he has researched extensively in Niger and Nigeria. He has notably focused on Salafi leaders and movements. He is currently starting a project on religious practices on Nigerian campuses.

An IFRA research training seminar, by Prof. Henry Lovejoy (University of Colorado, Boulder) * Thursday, 1^st of February 2018 at IFRA Library

This Thursday, 1^st of February 2018, IFRA was very pleased to host Prof. Henry Lovejoy, Assistant Professor at the University of Colorado Boulder (United States), historian, specialist of the history of the Atlantic World. Author of Prieto: Yorùbá Kingship in Colonial Cuba during the Age of Revolutions, Prof. Lovejoy initiated Liberated Africans (liberatedafricans.org), a collaborative research project aiming at identifying links between diasporas on both sides of the Atlantic.

From Monday 13^th to Friday 17^th of November 2017, Prof. Bernard Caron (Llacan-IFRA Nigeria), Prof. Francis Eghbokhare (University of Ibadan) and the Post-Graduate School of the University of Ibadan co-organised the Masterclass “Training on IT Tools for Electronic Corpus Annotation” at the Conference Centre of the University of Ibadan.

An IFRA Research seminar, By Prof. Laurent Fourchard (CERI/Sciences Po Paris)

Thursday, 11^th of January, IFRA Library

From the 11^th to 15^th of December 2017, IFRA organised a week of Masterclass entitled “10 Myths on Violence in Nigeria”. It took place at the IFRA library, Institute of African studies, University of Ibadan.
11 master and PhD students of the University of Ibadan in various fields of social sciences and humanities were selected to participate. The programme was led by Prof. Marc-Antoine Pérouse de Montclos, political scientist and specialist of Nigeria assisted by Ghislain Benrais, programme developer.

By Dr. Roberto Zaugg (University of Lausanne)
7^th of November 2017 (Ibadan)
8^th of November 2017 (Ile-Ife)

This week, IFRA had the pleasure to host Dr. Roberto Zaugg, Ambizione fellow of the Swiss National Science Foundation at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland. After completing his doctorate on the Kingdom of Naples in 2008, Dr. Zaugg recently extended his interests to autobiographical writings as well as to the slave trade and the cultural history of colonialism.

IFRA Masterclass

11^th to 15^th of December 2017

In Nigeria as in many other contexts, the aura of mystery surrounding violent phenomena shapes a conventional wisdom. This conventional wisdom englobes a series of widespread beliefs, commonly considered as accurate and referenced. If some of these beliefs effectively include elements of truth, others are, partially or totally, what one shall call “myths”.

On the 11th of October 2017, IFRA Nigeria was pleased to organise its next research training seminar at the IFRA library, Institute of African Studies, University of Ibadan. It was supervised by Dr. John Manton, Assistant Professor in History at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. It was part of a series of programmes in Ibadan together with Dr. Manton and Prof. Martin Gorsky, Professor in the History of Public Health at LSHTM. Prof. Gorsky will give a lecture on the 17th of November at the Department of History, University of Ibadan.

On Tuesday 26^th of September (2017) at 2pm occurred an exciting IFRA’s research seminar organised jointly with the Alliance Francaise at the Alliance Francaise Ibadan in Iyaganku. The seminar was run by Dr. Julien Bonhomme, anthropologist and lecturer at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris. Dr. Bonhomme had presented his book The Sex Thieves. Anthropology of a Rumor (2016, University of Chicago Press) the week before at the Alliance. The seminar was entitled “Media as fieldwork. How to do ethnography with press articles”. The seminar was opened to IFRA fellows, which comprises a network of more than 70 early researchers across Nigeria and beyond.

From Monday 19^th to Friday 23^rd of June 2017, a Research masterclass jointly organized by Sciences Po, Columbia University, the University of Ibadan and IFRA Nigeria was held. It brought 18 junior doctoral students from all over Nigeria to the University of Ibadan for an intensive workshop designed to train students in the intellectual questions, methods, and writing strategies relevant for their future careers. Students engaged in reading seminars around the topic of Sacred Urbanism, developed intellectual questions around that topic, and engaged in primary research at a field site.

21st of June 2017

Globafrica is an ambitious historical and archaeological project aiming at rethinking African long-term integration into the rest of the world. It intends to develop novel tools to foster a balanced vision of connections between Africa and other continents before the slave trade and colonialism, in the 18th and 19th centuries respectively. Phenomena such as migratory dynamics, demographic and epidemiological crises as well as increasing social complexity and state or cultural formations, are considered from the angle of intercontinental exchanges. As such, the project pays attention to the relations between oceanic and Saharan interfaces on the one hand, and inland political and social configurations on the other.

On 23rd of May 2017, our monthly IFRA research seminar took place in the IFRA library, Institute of African Studies, University of Ibadan. As usual, it was open to IFRA research fellows. Outstandingly however, it was not run by the IFRA core staff but by our Academic guest, Dr. Dominique Somda. Following the lecture she delivered on the 22nd of May in Draper’s Hall, Dr. Somda, sociocultural anthropologist and traveling faculty at the International Honours Programme (Brattleboro, Vermont, USA), addressed the topical issue of secrecy in social science and humanities research.

The goal was to introduce students to the research of secret issues. It consisted in an exploration of the anthropological production of knowledge in the context of secrecy.

This Tuesday 4th of April 2017, our second IFRA fellows research seminar took place at the IFRA Library. It followed a promising first session in March and gathered several Master and PhD students who had attended the previous session in addition to a few newcomers, from different departments of the University of Ibadan.

On Tuesday 28th of February, IFRA set up its first research seminar of 2017 at the IFRA library, Institute of African Studies, University of Ibadan. The seminar was intended for IFRA research fellows and followed a campaign for the renewal of our research fellowship programme. We were happy to receive a great number of registration requests for this event with diverse affiliations (peace and conflict studies, geography, anthropology, gender studies…). 18 people participated in this first session.