The Board of Trustees and Management Committee of the Yorùbá Academy has announced the appointment of Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún as the programme director.
According to Premium Times, Mr Túbọ̀sún, a linguist and writer, took over on September 15, 2020, from Adé Adéagbo who left as Executive Director, the academy said in a statement on Monday.
Until recently, Mr Túbọ̀sún was the Chevening Research Fellow at the British Library in London working on the African language print collections from the 19th Century with focus on Yorùbá, where he worked with Marion Wallace, the Africa Curator.
The Yorùbá Academy, founded in 2007, is an independent, non-profit, non-governmental, multi-disciplinary policy institution set up to foster a culture of Yorùbá learning and civilisation. Former Minister of Education, Babátúndé Fáfúnwá, was the Academy’s first Chairman Board of Trustees. The current Chairman is General Alani Akinrinade.
Mr Túbọ̀sún, 39, holds a Master’s in Linguistics/Teaching English as a Second Language from Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, United States (2012), and a Bachelor’s degree in Linguistics from the University of Ìbàdàn, Nigeria (2005).
He is both a Fulbright (2009) and Chevening (2019) and has worked in education in both Nigeria and The United States. He is also a creative writer, scholar, travel writer, poet, and translator, with work both in Yorùbá and in English. His first collection of poetry was titled Edwardsville by Heart, published in 2018. His work has been translated to Korean, Italian, and Spanish.