Sanya Osha Joins GloPhi to Explore Yorùbá Thought and Afro-Brazilian Epistemic Continuities

Prof. Sanya Osha will join the Center for Advanced Studies “Philosophizing in a Globalized World” as a Fellow from March to June 2026. As part of GloPhi’s Yoruba language/philosophy focus, Osha will contribute to the Center’s ongoing work on African languages, intellectual traditions, and global histories of philosophizing. His research engages Pre-Socratic systems of thought, West African philosophy, Southern African belief systems, and Africana philosophy, with regional specializations in West Africa, Southern Africa, and the African diaspora. He philosophizes in English and Yoruba. 

During his stay at GloPhi, Osha joins the Yoruba Language Focus to pursue a research project entitled “Major Concepts in Yoruba Cosmology and Epistemology.” The project investigates central concepts and features of Yoruba cosmology and epistemology, approaching Yoruba traditions as a rich field of philosophical reflection. It addresses questions of being and nothingness, God and god, monotheism and polytheism, faith and truth, the Ifa corpus, fetishism, cultism, determinism, conversion, modernity, and the newly coined concept of Global Yoruba.

In this context, Osha will also give a lecture entitled “A Transcontinental Pendulum: African and Afro-Brazilian Epistemic Continuities” as part of the lecture series Transatlantic Resonances. The lecture will explore the movements, transformations, and continuities of African epistemic traditions across the Atlantic, with particular attention to the ways in which African and Afro-Brazilian worlds of thought remain historically entangled.