Nwando Achebe

Nwando Achebe (born 7 March 1970), is a Nigerian-American academic, feminist scholar, and multi-award-winning historian.^[1] She is the Jack and Margaret Sweet Endowed Professor of History^[2] at Michigan State University, and the founding Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of West African History.^[3]

Background

Nwando Achebe was born in Enugu, eastern Nigeria^[4] to Nigerian writer, essayist, and poet, Chinua Achebe, and Christie Chinwe Achebe, a professor of Education.^[5] She is the wife of Folu Ogundimu, professor of journalism at Michigan State University, and mother of a daughter, Chino.^[6]

Career

Achebe received her Ph.D. in African History from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2000. An oral historian by training, her areas of expertise are West African History, women, gender and sexuality histories. In 1996 and 1998, she served as a Ford Foundation and Fulbright-Hays Scholar-in-Residence at The Institute of African Studies and The Department of History and International Studies at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. Her first academic position was as an Assistant Professor of History at the College of William and Mary. She then moved to Michigan State University in 2005 as a tenured Associate Professor, Professor in 2010, and is presently the Jack and Margaret Sweet Endowed Professor. She has published four books. Her first book, Farmers, Traders, Warriors, and Kings: Female Power and Authority in Northern Igboland, 1900-1960, was published by Heinemann in 2005. Her second book, the critically acclaimed The Female King of Colonial Nigeria: Ahebi Ugbabe, was published in 2011 by Indiana University Press.^[7] It is a full-length biography on the only female warrant chief and king in British Africa, and it has won three book awards: the Aidoo-Snyder Book Prize, The Barbara "Penny" Kanner Book Prize and the Gita Chaudhuri Book Prize.^[8] Dr. Achebe is a co-author of the 2018 History of West Africa E-Course Book. She is also co-editor with William Worger and Charles Ambler of A Companion to African History (2018).

Grants and awards

Nwando Achebe has received grants from the Wenner Gren Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, Woodrow Wilson, Fulbright-Hays, Ford Foundation, the World Health Organization and the National Endowment for the Humanities. She is also the recipient of three book awards.

Publications

• Farmers, Traders, Warriors, and Kings: Female Power and Authority in Northern Igboland, 1900-1960. ISBN 0325070784
• The Female King of Nigeria: Ahebi Ugbabe. ISBN 0253222486
• History of West Africa E-Course Book. ISBN 978-9983960204
• A Companion to African History. ISBN 047065631X

References