September 5, 2016 Toyin Falola Begins Tenure as Kluge Chair in Countries and Cultures of the South

Toyin Falola, a professor of African studies from the University of Texas at Austin, has arrived at the John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress to serve as Chair in Countries and Cultures of the South. Falola’s tenure began today, Sept. 6. He will be in residence for four months.

Falola is the Jacob and Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities and a University Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Texas. He is also a fellow of the Nigerian Academy of Letters and a fellow of the Historical Society of Nigeria.

While at the Library of Congress, Falola will spend his four months researching a project titled “African Immigrant Communities in the United States.” Falola seeks to document and to structure into a discernible narrative framework the stories and experiences of African intellectual and professional migrants to North America and Europe in what’s being called “the moment of brain drain.” He also wants to produce both a collection of aesthetically independent and readable stories of migration, its challenges, and its triumphs, and an archive of immigrant experiences for scholars and policymakers.

Falola is the author of numerous books, including “The African Diaspora: Slavery, Migration and Globalization,” “Violence in Nigeria: The Crisis of Religious Politics and Secular Ideologies,” “The Power of African Cultures,” and “Nationalism and African Intellectuals.” As a series editor, he manages leading monograph series for the following publishers: Routledge, Palgrave Macmillan, Cambria Press, Carolina Academic Press, the University of Rochester Press, and the Cambridge University Press. He also serves on the board of more than 20 journals on African Studies. He was the vice-president of the International Scientific Committee, UNESCO Slave Route Project. Falola is now the president of the Consortium of Pan-African University Press. He currently serves on the Library of Congress Scholars Council.

The Kluge Chair in Countries and Cultures of the South is a distinguished senior research position in residence at the Library appointed by the Librarian of Congress. Using research facilities and services at the Library, the scholar is expected to explore the history of the regions of Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, South and Southeast Asia, and the islands of the Pacific including Australia and New Zealand, using the immense foreign language collections of the Library of Congress.

Through a generous endowment from John W. Kluge, the Library of Congress established the Kluge Center in 2000 to bring together the world's best thinkers to distill wisdom from the Library's rich resources and to interact with policymakers in Washington. For more information about the Kluge Center visit loc.gov/kluge/.

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