Professor Paulo Fernando de Moraes Farias FBA

Inviting Institution: Institute of African Studies, University of Bayreuth

Home University: University of Birmingham, United Kingdom

Stay: 09. July 2017 – 16. July 2017 (as Visiting Fellow)

Paulo Fernando de Moraes Farias is a Fellow of the British Academy. He is also an Accademico della Accademia Ambrosiana (Milan), a Fellow of the Stockholm Collegium of World Literary History (University of Stockholm), and a Corresponding Member of the Academia de Letras da Bahia (Brazil).

The focus of his research is the history of West Africa and its trans-Saharan contacts. He has published on West African Arabic epigraphy, on the oral traditions of the Mande-speaking, Songhay-speaking, and Yoruba-speaking peoples, and on the Arabic chronicles written in seventeenth-century Timbuktu. In addition, he has written on the German explorer Heinrich Barth’s approach to this Timbuktu historical literature.