Paulo de Moraes Farias


Paulo Fernando de Moraes Farias, FBA, is a historian specialising in epigraphic sources for the medieval history of West Africa as well as West African oral traditions and the Timbuktu Chronicles. Since 2003, he has been Honorary Professor at the Department of African Studies and Anthropology at the University of Birmingham. After graduating from the Federal University of Bahia in 1963, Moreas Farias taught at Bahia's Centre for Afro-Oriental Studies and at the Central College of Salvador; his association with the National Union of Students led to harassment from the military government of Brazil after 1964, prompting him to flee to Africa. Settling with his family in Ghana, he completed a Master of Arts degree at the University of Ghana, but fled once again to Senegal and then Nigeria following the Ghanaian coup of 1966; two years later, he took up an academic post at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom, where he remained until retiring in 2003.

Honours

In July 2017, Moraes Farias was elected a Fellow of the British Academy, the United Kingdom's national academy for the humanities and social sciences.

Selected works