Nwando Achebe

Nwando Achebe was born in Enugu, eastern Nigeria to Nigerian writer, essayist, and poet, Chinua Achebe, and Christie Chinwe Achebe, a professor of Education. She is the wife of Folu Ogundimu, professor of journalism at Michigan State University, and mother of a daughter, Chino.

Achebe received her Ph.D. in African History from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2000. An oral historian by training, her areas of expertise are West African History, women, gender and sexuality histories. In 1996 and 1998, she served as a Ford Foundation and Fulbright-Hays Scholar-in-Residence at The Institute of African Studies and The Department of History and International Studies at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. Her first academic position was as an Assistant Professor of History at the College of William and Mary. She then moved to Michigan State University in 2005 as a tenured Associate Professor, Professor in 2010, and is presently, the Jack and Margaret Sweet Endowed Professor. She is the author of two scholarly books. Her first book, Farmers, Traders, Warriors, and Kings: Female Power and Authority in Northern Igboland, 1900-1960 was published by Heinemann in 2005. Her second book, the critically acclaimed, The Female King of Colonial Nigeria: Ahebi Ugbabe was published in 2011 by Indiana University Press. It is a full-length biography on the only female warrant chief and king in British Africa and has won three book awards: the Aidoo-Snyder Book Prize, The Barbara "Penny" Kanner Book Prize and the Gita Chaudhuri Book Prize.

Nwando Achebe has received grants from the Wenner Gren Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, Woodrow Wilson, Fulbright-Hays, Ford Foundation, the World Health Organization and the National Endowment for the Humanities. She is also the recipient of three book awards.

• Farmers, Traders, Warriors, and Kings: Female Power and Authority in Northern Igboland, 1900-1960. ISBN 0325070784
• The Female King of Nigeria: Ahebi Ugbabe. ISBN 0253222486