Ngom and African Studies Center Featured in The Brink
Prof. Fallou Ngom, Director of the African Studies Center and Professor of Anthropology, was featured in a major writeup in The Brink, the flagship research magazine of Boston University which highlights the cutting edge research happening at the university. The African Studies Center is the oldest of the centers affiliated with the BU Pardee School of Global Studies and one of the leading institutions in African studies in the country.
The feature, entitled, “Digitizing Ajami, a Centuries Old African Script,” highlights the pioneering work that Prof. Ngom is doing in bringing this centuries old African script back to life, here at Boston University. Except from the feature:
Ajami, is still flourishing; people throughout Africa use it to write phonetic renderings of about a dozen languages, including Swahili, Wolof, and Hausa. But because texts written in Ajami are often passed down through families where they can be lost over generations, many are inaccessible to scholars, few of whom can read the script anyway. Those who know about Ajami texts often dismiss them as mundane, with little scholarly value. Ngom, director of Boston University’s African Studies Center, disagrees. He is digitizing more than 18,000 of these indigenous texts—including those in Ajami, Arabic, and Ajami-Arabic—and making them widely available to offer scholars new insight into African history, literature, culture, medicine, and everyday life.
You can read the entire feature, here.
Fallou Ngom is a Professor of Anthropology and Director of the African Studies Center, an affiliate center at the Boston University Pardee School of Global Studies. His research interests include the interactions between African languages and non-African languages, the Africanization of Islam, and Ajami literatures—records of West African languages written in Arabic script. Read more about him, here.