The year 2020 will be even more exciting for the international Library of African music (ILAM). There will be a series of events including hosting master musicians from different countries, fellowship programmes and collaborations with universities overseas. To start off we welcome Professor Austin Oghenemaro Emielu as a visiting professor for the next three years. Professor Emielu will be based at ILAM where he will be engaged in teaching and research.
Austin Oghenemaro Emielu holds a Ph.D. in performing arts (music emphasis), an M.A. in African Studies (music emphasis) and a B.A. in performing arts from the Universities of Ilorin and Ibadan, Nigeria. Between 2001 and 2017, he held faculty positions at the University of Ilorin, Nigeria and Kwara State University Malete, Nigeria. In 2012, he was a visiting African Humanities Programme post-doctoral fellow to the Department of Music and Musicology/ILAM at Rhodes University. He is currently a Professor and Visiting Scholar at the Department of Music, University of Ghana, Legon. Adopting a multi-disciplinary perspective that braids history, sociology, musicology, cultural studies, anthropology, media studies, economics, music education and socio-linguistics, Austin Emielu’s main area of research is African popular music and popular culture. He has over thirty five academic publications to his credit. He is the author of the book Nigerian Highlife Music (2013). His essays have also appeared in British Journal of Music Education (2011), Popular Music (2011), African Music (2013), Ethnomusicology (2018), Journal of the African Literature Association (2016) and Journal of Musical Arts in Africa (2019) among others. He also contributed entries to Encyclopaedia of Popular Music of the World: Genres Sub-Saharan Africa (2019) and Sage International Encyclopaedia of Music and Culture (2019). Austin Emielu is a Fellow and Adviser of the African Humanities Programme of the American Council of Learned Societies, New York; African Studies Association Presidential Fellow (2019) and the Liaison Officer (Nigeria) for the International Council for Traditional Music. He is a member of the Society for Ethnomusicology, the African Studies Association and the Association of Nigerian Musicologists. Besides his academic engagements, Austin Emielu is an accomplished dance band musician and music producer with about four decades of music industry experience in Africa.