Achebe-Ogundimu wins the Barbara 'Penny' Kanner Prize

DAUGHTER of literary icon, Chinua Achebe, Prof. Nwando Achebe-Ogundimu, an award-winning author and Professor of History at Michigan State University, has won the Barbara 'Penny' Kanner Prize and the Gita Chaudhuri Prize of the Western Association of Women Historian for her seminal work, The Female King of Colonial Nigeria: Ahebi Ugbabe.She 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. Dr. Achebe's research interests involve the use of oral history in the study of women, gender, and sexuality in Nigeria. Her first book, Farmers, Traders, Warriors, and Kings: Female Power and Authority in Northern Igboland, 1900-1960 was published by Heinemann in 2005. Professor Achebe's award-winning second book, The Female King of Colonial Nigeria: Ahebi Ugbabe (Indiana University Press, 2011) is a full length critical biography on the only female warrant chief and king in all of colonial Nigeria, and arguably British Africa. The writing was funded by a generous grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. Dr. Achebe is presently working on a WHO-funded grant on polio eradication in Northern Nigeria.Ahebi Ugbaba was born late in the nineteenth century in Igboland, in present-day Nigeria.
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