His work signifies the high regard in which he is held by leaders and members in his field throughout the nation, says the Academy.
Nigeria's Professor Jacob Olupona of Harvard University has been elected to the illustrious American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Academy announced Wednesday, at Cambridge, Massachusetts, from its headquarters.
"On behalf of the Officers and members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, we are pleased to announce your election to the Academy and warmly welcome you as a new member," Mr Olupona was informed in a letter jointly signed by Nancy C. Andrews, Chair of the Board, and David W. Oxtoby, President of the Academy, which stated that the honour of the election "signifies the high regard in which you are held by leaders in your field and members throughout the nation."
The American Academy of Arts and Sciences, founded in 1780, "honors excellence and convenes leaders from every field of human endeavor to examine new ideas, address issues of importance to the nation and the world, and work together, as expressed in our charter, "to cultivate every art and science which may tend to advance the interest, honor, dignity, and happiness of a free, independent, and virtuous people" the Academy stated in its letter to Mr Olupona, stressing that "Our work has helped set the direction of research and analysis in science and technology policy, global security and international affairs, social policy, education, the humanities, and the arts."
The earliest members of the Academy display a galaxy of some founding fathers of the United States, including John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, and George Washington, as well as past presidents like John F. Kennedy.
Other great historic members include local and international figures like Alexander Graham Bell and Albert Einstein, Margaret Mead, Jonas Salk, Barbara McClintock, John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., Aaron Copland, Martha Graham, John Hope Franklin, Georgia O'Keeffe, E. O. Wilson, Madeleine Albright, and Colin Powell. International Honorary Members have included Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein, Winston Churchill, Wislawa Szymborska, Laurence Olivier, Mary Leakey, Gabriel Garcia Márquez, Akira Kurosawa, and Nelson Mandela.
Current members represent a cocktail of innovative thinkers in every field and profession, including more than two hundred and fifty Nobel and Pulitzer Prize winners.
Mr Olupona, a professor of African Traditional Religion, was educated at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, and the Boston University in the United States where he completed his master's and doctorate degrees. He received the Nigerian National Order of Merit, the prestigious award given each year for intellectual accomplishment in the four areas of science, medicine, engineering/technology, and humanities in 2007, seven years after the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, conferred him with an honorary doctorate in divinity. In 2018, he also received the Martin E. Marty Award for the Public Understanding of Religion.
A citation on the website of Harvard University reads in part: "His current research focuses on 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 United States to establish churches, African Pentecostals in American congregations, American branches of independent African churches, and indigenous African religious communities in the United States. His earlier research ranged across African spirituality and ritual practices, spirit possession, Pentecostalism, Yoruba festivals, animal symbolism, icons, phenomenology, and religious pluralism in Africa and the Americas.
"In his book City of 201 Gods: Ilé-Ifè in Time, Space, and the Imagination, 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. His other books include Òrìsà Devotion as World Religion: The Globalization of Yorùbá Religious Culture, co-edited with Terry Rey, and Kingship, Religion, and Rituals in a Nigerian Community: A Phenomenological Study of Ondo Yoruba Festivals, which has become a model for ethnographic research among Yoruba-speaking communities. In 2012, he was named one of Harvard's Walter Channing Cabot Fellows, for distinguished publications."
Among the earliest congratulations that greeted Mr Olupona came from the newly-elected President of Harvard University, Claudine Gay, who said:
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"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. 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 advance 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."
Ms Gay is currently the Edgerley Family Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, at Harvard University, and will assume duties as president of the university in July 2023.
The formal induction is scheduled to be held on Saturday, 30 September at the Academy's headquarters.
