Associate Dean for Access, Faculty Development, and Strategic Implementation

Nwando Achebe

Associate Dean for Access, Faculty Development, and Strategic Implementation

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 Access, Faculty Development, and Strategic Implementation, 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 a 2022-23 ACE Fellow and a 2022 HERS Leadership Fellow; as well as a member of the Nigerian Academy of Letters, and Vice President Elect of the African Studies Association.  

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.

If you would like to contact Dr. Achebe, please contact her assistant, Victoria Pierce at  malkow14@msu.edu or 432-3321.