Nwando Achebe (pronounced: Wan-do Ah-chě-bě; [pronunciation key: ě as in pet]), the Jack and Margaret Sweet Endowed Professor of History, is a multi-award-winning historian, and Associate Dean for Access, Faculty Development, and Strategic Implementation in the College of Social Science at Michigan State University. She is a 2022-2023 ACE Fellow, founding editor-in-chief of Journal of West African History, co-director of Christie and Chinua Achebe Foundation, and co-CEO of Achebe Masterworks. She is also an elected member of the Nigerian Academy of Letters and Vice President of the African Studies Association.
Dr. Achebe received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2000. In 1996 and 1998, 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. She was also a 2000 Woodrow Wilson Women’s Studies Fellow. Her research interests involve the use of oral history in the study of women, gender, and sexuality in Nigeria.
Achebe is the author of six books. Her first book, Farmers, Traders, Warriors, and Kings: Female Power and Authority in Northern Igboland, 1900-1960 was published by Heinemann. Achebe’s second book, The Female King of Colonial Nigeria: Ahebi Ugbabe(Indiana University Press, 2011), winner of three book awards—The Aidoo-Snyder Book Award, The Barbara “Penny” Kanner Book Award, and The Gita Chaudhuri Book Award—is a full length critical biography on the only female warrant chief and king in colonial Nigeria, and arguably British Africa. The writing was funded by a generous grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. Dr. Achebe is co-author of History of West Africa E-Course Book (British Arts and Humanities Research Council, 2018). She is also co-editor, with William Worger and Charles Ambler of A Companion to African History (2018), co-editor with Claire Robertson of Holding the World Together: African Women in Changing Perspective(Wisconsin University Press, 2019); and sole-author of Ohio University Press’ Female Monarchs and Merchant Queens in Africa (2020).
In addition to the Wenner-Gren, Dr. Achebe has received a number of other prestigious grants including awards from Rockefeller Foundation, Woodrow Wilson, Fulbright-Hays, Ford Foundation, the World Health Organization, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. She received the 2020 Inspirational Women of the Year (professional achievement category); was named one of “Nigeria’s 100 Most Inspiring Women For 2021“; received Michigan State University’s highest award for academic achievement, the William J. Beal Outstanding Faculty Award (2021); and the 2023 Distinguished Africanist award from the NY State African Studies Association.
She has given over one hundred invited keynote lectures and talks on four continents, in universities in the US, UK, Portugal, Italy, Spain, Germany, The Gambia, Sierra Leone, Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, South Africa, and China. She has also served as expert consultant for The History Channel/A&E Network Corporation’s “Roots,” the miniseries remake, Disney Channel’s “African Princess Project”; and has been interviewed and featured in documentaries and news programing on three different continents. She was featured in The History Channel documentaries, “Roots: A History Revealed,” and “Roots: A New Vision;” South Africa Broadcasting Corporation’s news program, “MorningLive,” Nigerian Television Authority’s “Weekend Deal 15 Minutes Studio,” and British Broadcasting Corporation’s “Professor Chinua Achebe: A Hero Returns 2,” Witness: Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, The History Hour and The Novels that Shaped Our World—Things Fall Apart. Achebe has also been interviewed and featured in BBC Radio 4’s “Nsukka is Burning,” and in two Australian documentaries—“The Invisible Hand,” by true crime podcast company Casefile Presents, and Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Radio National documentary on Benin Bronzes, “Stuff the British Stole.” She was also a featured speaker at the 2019 Körber History Forum debate in Berlin, “A Stolen Past: “Europe and the Compensation of Colonial Injustice.” You can listen to her speak to New Books Network and Africa Past and Present podcast about her critical biography, The Female King.