Testimonials From Our Past Global Visiting Professors

The TORCH Global Visiting Professorship has been fostering scholarly research and facilitating interactions with academics and prominent professionals from around the world since 2015. In the recent years the Professorship has been generously supported by All Souls College, before which it was convened with the help of the Mellon Foundation. The Professorship aims to build meaningful connections between universities in G77 countries and Oxford. Over the years, we have hosted professors from diverse fields, including South Asian history, Latin, public policy, literature, and creative writing, to name a few.

In this reflection, we look back on the experiences of two visiting professors and explore how their time at Oxford translated to collaborations, conversations, and ideation beyond their stay in the city of spires. 

Dr Obari Gomba, Global Visiting Professor (2021-2022)
Associate Dean of Humanities, University of Port Harcourt, Nigera 

"My time as Global South Visiting Professor at TORCH Oxford has remained a major point in my career. The reception was great and the ambience helped me a lot under the spectre of COVID 19. I completed two papers and presented them at All Souls College and African Studies Centre. The one on selected postcolonial Nigerian plays, on intra-regional conflict in colonial Nigeria, has been published in Europe. The second paper is now the first piece in my book of essays, entitled FREE TROUBLES: A WRITER'S EYES ON THE WORLD, published last year by Masobe Books. While in Oxford, I submitted my book of poems, THE LILT OF THE REBEL, for the PAWA Prize for African Poetry and it won the prize in February 2022. Although I had written the poems before I got to Oxford, the publication coincided with the earliest days of my fellowship, and the book was the subject of my reading at St Luke's Chapel on 2nd December 2021, and at Wolfson College on 7th December 2021.

Last year, my play, GRIT, won the Nigeria Prize for Literature 2023. 

I am grateful to Professors Elleke Boehmer and Katherine Collins, both of Oxford, for allowing me to contribute to a forthcoming book on Southern Lives, to be released this year by Bloomsbury. I have also played host in my university in Nigeria to Mr Felix Rolt, a doctoral student supervised by Professor David Pratten. Mr. Rolt was with me for one academic year and conducted his research successfully. Also, through the recommendation of Professor Pratten, I have hosted and collaborated with Dr Iva Pesa of the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. She and her team have successfully visited Nigeria and conducted research, the high point was a conference we curated in my University last July."

Professor Marcio Goldman, Global Visiting Professor (2017-18)
Professor in Social Anthropology, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

"Even though this professorship took place six years ago, I can say that my experience was at the same time enjoyable, productive and very important for me. Perhaps the most valuable thing was the opportunity to have direct contact with an academic context that very different from my own and which, as we know in the case of social anthropology is one of the most important in the history of the discipline. This includes both professors and students from different parts of the world — which, for me, was both new and very enriching.

I attended seminars held by the social anthropology department and some others organized by other institutes and institutions. I also participated in the Workshop “Brazil at the Crossroads: Looking Beyond the Current Crisis”, promoted by TORCH, where I presented the paper “Beyond identity: Anti-Syncretisms and Counter-Miscegenations in Brazil”, and attended a series of other presentations. I also presented the paper “Why Are There Always Candomblés? Situated Knowledges of Miscegenation and Syncretism in Brazil”, at the Anthropology Departmental Seminar Series. And, in 2019 (at the end of my relationship with TORCH), I presented the paper “On the Other Side of Time”, at the Seminar “Inscribing Biographies in Global South History”, promoted by TORCH.

Furthermore, my stay at Oxford made it possible to present the paper “Teaching Anthropology: A Politics and Religion Masterclass” at the Cosmology, Religion, Ontology and Culture (CROC) Seminar at the University College of London. 

All these presentations, as well as those that I only attended, were of fundamental importance for the development of my work, as they introduced me to points of view and theoretical and methodological trends that were very different from those I was used to. In this sense, the debates that the presentations provided were especially important.

As I have stated, the interactions were very important for my academic projects, in the sense that they pointed to new directions of reflection. The more intense contact with Professors Ramón Sarró and Elizabeth Ewart (from Oxford) and Martin Holbraad (from UCL) resulted in ideas for collaboration in projects and publications that are still in progress (let’s remember that the covid-19 pandemic made everything a little more difficult)."

Applications for the next round of Global Visiting Professorships (2026-2027) will be announced in the coming months. Keep an eye out on this space: TORCH Global Visiting Professorship Scheme | TORCH | The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities.