Nwando Achebe - Department of History, Michigan State University

This is Ashley Newby and you’re listening to The Black Studies podcast, a Mellon grant sponsored series of conversations examining the history of the field. Our conversations engage with a wide range of activists and scholars - senior figures in the field, late doctoral students, and everyone in between, culture workers, and political organizers - in order to explore the cultural and political meaning of Black Studies as an area of inquiry and its critical methods.Today's conversation is with Nwando Achebe, who teaches in the Department of History at Michigan State University where she serves as Jack and Margaret Sweet Endowed Professor of History and also works as Associate Dean for Access, Faculty Development, and Strategic Implementation in the College of Social Science. Her work is wide-ranging and across media, having been extensively featured in radio and television documentaries, popular print media, and scholarly journals. Achebe's written work includes the groundbreaking books Farmers, Traders, Warriors, and Kings: Female Power and Authority in Northern Igboland, 1900-1960 and The Female King of Colonial Nigeria: Ahebi Ugbabe, the co-authored History of West Africa E-Course Book, edited collections including  A Companion to African History and Holding the World Together: African Women in Changing Perspective. In this episode, we discuss the place of the study of Africa in Black Studies, the importance of gender in the study of Africa and the Black Atlantic, and how oral testimony and knowledge production transforms the study of history.