The British Academy has awarded Global Professorships worth over £7 million to ten internationally-recognised scholars in the humanities and social sciences, including Dr Shadreck Chirikure (Professor, Department of Archaeology at the University of Cape Town) who will be joining us here at the School in 2019.
The Global Professorships programme provides mid-career to senior scholars, active in any discipline within the social sciences and the humanities and based in any country overseas, with the opportunity to relocate to the UK for four years and contribute to UK research and higher education. The Global Professorships programme seeks to demonstrate and enhance the UK’s commitment to international research partnerships and collaboration as well as strengthen the UK’s research capacity and capability in the humanities and the social sciences.
Dr Chirikure will be researching archaeometry and precolonial African urban social formations. Shadreck Chirikure’s Archaeological Materials Laboratory is Africa's only facility dedicated to the study of pyrotechnology practiced by farming communities of the last 2000 years of the sub-Saharan past.