US-based Nigerian bags 2023 Mellon/ACLS award

By Chuks Eze
A United States of America-based Nigerian scholar, Mr. Chijioke Onah, has won the 2023 Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellowship award.
This brought to 27 the number of academic awards he has won since 2013.
This was made known in a statement by the scholarship giant, the American Council of Learned Society (ACLS), a copy of which was made available to reporters.
Onah’s project, “Toxic Intimacies: The (Bio) Politics of Waste and Disposability in Africa and African Diaspora,“ which won him the award, was selected out of about 700 entries from countries across the world.
The Enugu State-born prolific scholar is currently pursuing a doctorate degree at Cornell University, USA, with a bent in Black Atlantic Literature, African Studies, Trauma and Memory Studies and Environmental Humanities.
President of the donor organisation, Joy Connolly, said the award programme was a sponsorship grant from the ACLS’s partner, the Mellon Foundation. She noted that it was initiated to support exceptional emerging scholars who were pursuing pathbreaking research.
Part of the statement read: “ACLS is proud to announce that Chijioke K. Onah has been awarded a 2023 Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellowship, the statement read, in part. He emerges through a rigorous, and multi-stage peer review.”
She also stated that the award, which aims at supporting innovative approaches to dissertation research in the humanities and interpretative social sciences with cash support of $50,000, is a new category of a series of fellowship and grant programmes of the ACLS.
According to her, 44 other scholars equally won the 2023 fellowship award, including three other Nigerians, who would also get $50,000 cash support each.
A breakdown of the cash support showed that $40,000 stipend is for the fellowship year, $8,000 for project-related research, training, professional development, and travel; while $2,000 stipend is meant to support external mentorship and critical expert advising the fellow’s project.
The ACLS boss also stressed that the award was designed to support and encourage bold and innovative doctoral students in the humanities and interpretative social sciences through their dissertation research, especially at the formative stage of dissertation development.
She thanked the Mellon Foundation for her partnership, pointing out that such support helps to forge pathways towards a more diverse and inclusive academy.
In his reaction, Mr. Onah expressed joy at the development even as he dedicated the award to all indigent students in Nigeria and Africa, describing it as a validation of his hard work and a push to do more.
He thanked the award donors for selecting his work and noted that the accompanying financial support would significantly aid his present and future academic endeavours.
“To be named a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellow is to be recognised alongside other extraordinarily talented scholars. But, I see it much as a push to do more rather than simply a validation of my past efforts,“ he said.