Nwando Achebe

Endowed Professors College of Social Science

• Jack and Margaret Sweet Endowed Professorship in History
• Funded by Jack D. and Margaret D. Sweet

• History

Bio

Nwando Achebe, the Jack and Margaret Sweet Endowed Professor of History, is also the Faculty Excellence Advocate for the College of Social Science, and is an award-winning historian, whose research interests involve the use of oral history in the study of women, gender, and sexuality in Nigeria.

Ahcebe earned her PhD from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 2000. Prior to that, she served as a Ford Foundation and Fulbright-Hays Scholar-in-Residence at the Institute of African Studies and History Department of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka in 1996 and 1998.

She is the author of two books: Farmers, Traders, Warriors, and Kings: Female Power and Authority in Northern Igboland, 1900-1960, in 2005, and The Female King of Colonial Nigeria: Ahebi Ugbabe, a full-length critical biography on the only female warrant chief and king in all of colonial Nigeria, and arguably all of British Africa, in 2011. The Female King won three book awards and was funded by a grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. Achebe’s work has also been funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, the World Health Organization, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, among others. She has served as an expert consultant for “Roots” on the History Channel, and has been featured in documentaries and news programing on three different continents.