Associate Dean for Diversity, Equity & Inclusion

Nwando Achebe

Associate Dean for Diversity, Equity & Inclusion
(professional leave AY 2023)

Jack and Margaret Sweet
Endowed Professor, History

Nwando Achebe (pronounced: Wan-do Ah-chě-bě; [pronunciation key: ě as in pet]), the Jack and Margaret Sweet Endowed Professor of History, and Associate Dean for Diversity, Equity & Inclusion, is a multi- award-winning historian and teacher at Michigan State University. She is also the founding editor-in-chief of the Journal of West African History.  

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 femalewarrant chief and king in colonial British Africa. The writing was funded by a generous grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. Dr. Achebe is 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 (2019), co-editor with Claire Robertson of Holding the World Together: African Women in Changing Perspective (Wisconsin University Press, 2019); and sole-author of Female Monarchs and Merchant Queens in Africa (Ohio University Press, 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.

For appointments, please contact Tom Douglas at dougl220@msu.edu or 353-1771.