Synopsis

Prof. Dr. Abdalla Uba Adamu holds double professorships in Science Education (1997) and Media and Cultural Communication (2012) from Bayero University Kano, Nigeria. His main research focus is on transnational media flows and their impact on the transformation of Muslim Hausa popular culture, especially in literature, film, music and performing arts. He has developed courses on digital cultures and promotes netnography as a research methodology in documenting Hausa online media ethnographies. He is the Chairman of a research cluster based in Bayero University Kano that explores the applications of Visual Anthropology in research. He is the Chairman of Visually Ethnographic Networks, the Institute of Islamic Calligraphy and Geometric Designs, and Innovative Educational Synergy Consultants, all based in Kano, Nigeria.

Prof. Adamu served as a Fulbright African Senior Research Scholar, with his residency at the Center for Studies in Higher Education, University of California, Berkeley, from 1991 to 1992. This led to his first major book, Reform and Adaptation in Nigerian University Curricula, 1960–1992: Living on the Credit Line (Edwin Mellen Press, 1994). He was also awarded a place on the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Resident Fellows programme at the Bellagio Study Center, Bellagio, Italy, from October to November 1993.

In October 2015 Prof. Adamu was invited to teach four courses at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, as a visiting professor. Earlier, in August 2015, he was the guest speaker at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, Germany, where he discussed youth, popular culture and insurgency in northern Nigeria. From Berlin he proceeded to the University of Hamburg, where he made a special presentation on using consumer digital media technologies in the preservation of unique African manuscripts. In 2013 he was again in Berlin for the retirement conference of Prof. Dr. Heike Behrend. The conference, whose theme was Testing and Contesting Regimes of Visibility, was organised by colleagues and students of Prof. Behrend, who retired from the University of Cologne.

In 2012 he was appointed European Union Visiting Professor for the project ‘The Modern University’ at the Department of African Languages and Cultures, University of Warsaw, Poland, from 1 March to 31 May 2012. At Warsaw he taught two highly popular courses: Transnationalism and African Popular Culture and Oral Traditions in Local and Global Contexts. He also coordinated ‘Passages of Culture’, a research collaboration between German and African universities sponsored by the Volkswagen Foundation from 2009 to 2013 and based at the University of Basel, Switzerland.

Over the years he has served as Visiting Professor at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London; the University of Florida, Gainesville; Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey; Columbia University, New York; the University of Basel; Freie Universität Berlin; Universität Hamburg; Universität zu Köln; Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin; and Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz. He has served as an external examiner at Andhra University, Andhra Pradesh, India; the University of Warsaw, Poland; Humboldt University; and the University of Cologne.

From 2016 to 2021 he was the Vice-Chancellor (President) of the National Open University of Nigeria (NOUN), the only single-mode online university in Nigeria.