OLUFEMI TAIWO
I was born and raised in Ibadan, Nigeria. I attended Ibadan Grammar School, Ibadan. It remains one of my cherished aims, if I live long enough, to write about growing up in this great city the greatness of which is often unacknowledged by many who have direct experience of it. I earned undergraduate and graduate degrees from the University of Ife (now Obafemi Awolowo University), Ile-Ife, Nigeria, and graduate degrees from the University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada. I taught at the Obafemi Awolowo University until 1990. I moved to the United States of America in 1990. First, I served as a Rockefeller Postdoctoral Fellow at the Africana Studies and Research Center, Cornell University in 1990/1991. I moved to Loyola University, Chicago, where I taught from 1991 till 2001. Since 2001, I have been a Professor of Philosophy and Global African Studies and Director of the Global African Studies Program at Seattle University, Seattle. Over the course of my career, I have served as a Staff Development Fellow, under the Canada-Nigeria Linkage Programme in Women’s Studies, at the Institute for the Study of Women, Mount Saint Vincent University, and the Centre for International Studies, Dalhousie University, both in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada from 1988 to 1989; Visiting Distinguished Minority Scholar at the University of Wisconsin at Eau Claire, Eau Claire, Wisconsin, U.S.A., November 1997; Visiting Professor at the Institut für Afrikastudien, Universität Bayreuth, Bayreuth, Germany, 1999; a Ford Foundation Visiting Postdoctoral Research and Teaching Fellow at the Carter G. Woodson Institute for Afro-American and African Studies, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia, 2000-2001; Visiting Professor of Philosophy, Ewha Womans University, Seoul, South Korea; and Visiting Professor of Philosophy, the University of the West Indies, Mona, Kingston, Jamaica, 2009 and 2010. Among other awards, I have been the recipient of a Getty Foundation Grant for a collaborative project on Yorùbá Art and Aesthetics; a Henry Phillips Grant from the American Philosophical Society for work on Jurisprudence; Rockefeller Postdoctoral Fellowship; Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship; and a Staff Development Fellowship awarded by the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), at various times in my career. I am one of the founders of the International Society for African Philosophy and Studies (ISAPS). He also helped found and serve as joint editor for the electronic journal, West Africa Review [www.africaknowledgeproject.com]. I served on the Committee for International Cooperation of the American Philosophical Association from 1993 to 1996 and was the founding editor of the APA Newsletter on Philosophy and International Cooperation. I organized, on behalf of the American Philosophical Association, the Fulbright 50th Anniversary Distinguished Fellow Lecture as part of the Fulbright 50th Anniversary Distinguished Fellows’ Program in April 1996.
