Africa Institute Fellowships 2027 in Sharjah for African studies

The Africa Institute in Sharjah studies Africa and its diaspora, and it pays scholars to come and do that work in residence. Four named fellowships are on offer for the coming year, two for senior academics and two for researchers who finished a doctorate recently.

The four fellowships

Two senior fellowships honour the novelist Toni Morrison, in African diaspora literature and cultural studies, and the Africanist Ali Mazrui, in global African studies. Two postdoctoral fellowships honour the curator Okwui Enwezor, in visual culture and performance studies, and the scholar Fatema Mernissi. Each is a full-time residency in Sharjah, running roughly from September to June.

Who can apply

The senior fellowships are open to scholars at associate or full professor level, or their equivalents within or outside the academy, which explicitly includes independent authors and public intellectuals with recognised writing in the field. The postdoctoral route asks for a doctorate awarded within the last five years. Nationality is not a criterion anywhere in the call.

What the institute is

It is a research centre and a postgraduate school at once, running master's and doctoral programmes in African and African diaspora studies alongside the fellowships. For an African researcher this matters: the subject of the place is your subject, and the library and colleagues are organised around it rather than treating it as a regional speciality.

How the process runs

Applications go through an online portal only, never by email, and incomplete or late submissions are discarded. You supply two samples of writing, published or not, a letter of interest, a curriculum vitae and the contact details of three referees whom the institute approaches itself. Shortlisting happens in October, interviews in the middle of November, and offers by the middle of December. Fellows arrive in Sharjah in the middle of August to settle before the programme starts.

Deadline

The application deadline is Wednesday, September 30, 2026 at 11:59 in the evening, Gulf time. The portal has been open since the beginning of July, so the file can be assembled and saved in stages.