20th April, 2023
Nigeria’s Prof. Jacob Olupona at the at the Harvard Divinity School, has been elected into American Academy of Arts and Science.
He has a joint appointment as Professor of African and African American Studies in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University.
Responding to this achievement, Prof. Claudine Gay, the Harvard Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Science congratulated Olupona.
Gay, who is the newly elected President of Harvard University, said “Please accept my heartiest congratulations on your election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
“This is a singular honor in recognition of your outstanding contributions to your discipline and to society at large, and one that is richly deserved.”
She said with a history dating back to its establishment by John Adams, James Bowdoin, John Hancock and others, the Academy has a long and illustrious tradition of projects and studies that advanced the public good.
“I am sure that with you as one of its new members the American Academy will continue in the best way possible its research on the emerging problems that face our society today.
“Although those challenges are perhaps somewhat different from those addressed by the 18th-century founders, I know that you will bring to your membership the same penetrating independent insight and analysis those scholars epitomized and envisioned many years ago,” she added.
Olupona is a scholar of indigenous African religions who came to Harvard after serving as a professor at the University of California, Davis.
He is working on a study of the religious practices of the estimated one million Africans who have emigrated to the United States over the last 40 years, examining in particular several populations that remain relatively invisible in the American religious landscape: “reverse missionaries” who have come to the U.S. to establish churches, African Pentecostals in American congregations, American branches of independent African churches, and indigenous African religious communities in the U.S.
In his forthcoming book Ile-Ife: The City of 201 Gods, he examines the modern urban mixing of ritual, royalty, gender, class, and power, and how the structure, content, and meaning of religious beliefs and practices permeate daily life.
He has authored or edited seven other books, including Kingship, Religion, and Rituals in a Nigerian Community: A Phenomenological Study of Ondo Yoruba Festivals, which has been used for ethnographic research among Yoruba-speaking communities.