Imaginative Minds: An Interdisciplinary Symposium

30 April-1 May 2004

The British Academy, 10 Carlton House Terrace, London SW1Y 5AH

Karin Barber

Karin Barber is Professor of African Cultural Anthropology at the University of Birmingham, and was Director of the Centre of West African Studies 1998-2001. She studied at Cambridge and UCL before going on to do a PhD at the University of Ife, Nigeria. She spent more than three years doing ethnographic fieldwork on the social role of oral genres in the small Yoruba town of Okuku, after which she taught at the University of Ife for seven years in a department where the sole medium of instruction was Yoruba. During this period she also undertook a research project on the Yoruba popular theatre, which involved travelling with a professional theatre company and participating in their improvised, but long and complex, dramatic productions. This work led to a broader interest in African popular culture, and she has travelled to Eastern and Southern Africa to produce a comparative overview of the popular arts in Africa.

Her interest has always been in how to reconcile the close analysis of textuality with a socio-historical account of the conditions which shape textual and other cultural forms: that is, how to bring interpretative and explanatory perspectives together. Her books include I Could Speak Until Tomorrow: Oriki, Women and the Past in a Yoruba Town (1991), which won the Amaury Talbot Prize, and The Generation of Plays: Yoruba Popular Life in Theatre (2000), which won the Herskovits Award. Her current research, which was supported by a British Academy Research Readership (2001-3) is for a general and comparative book on the anthropology of texts. She was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2003.