Rate My Professor Gloria Chuku

Gloria Chuku is Professor and Chair of the Department of Africana Studies at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), specializing in African History. She is also Affiliate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies and the Language, Literacy, and Culture Ph.D. Program at UMBC. Chuku earned her Ph.D. in History from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, M.A. in History from the University of Port Harcourt, and B.A. in Education/History from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. Her career includes early lectureships at Abia State University and Imo State University in Nigeria, followed by positions in the United States: Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Memphis (1999–2000), Assistant Professor at South Carolina State University (2000–2003), Associate Professor at Morgan State University (2003–2004) and Millersville University (2004–2008), and at UMBC since 2008, advancing to full Professor in 2015.

Chuku’s research focuses on Igbo history and culture, gender studies, women’s political economies in colonial and modern Nigeria and Africa, ethnonationalisms and conflicts in Nigeria, African nationalism and intellectual history, slavery, the slave trade, and the African Diaspora. Her major publications include the monograph Igbo Women and Economic Transformation in Southeastern Nigeria, 1900–1960 (Routledge, 2005), edited volumes The Igbo Intellectual Tradition: Creative Conflict in African and African Diasporic Thought (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), Ethnicities, Nationalities, and Cross-Cultural Representations in Africa and the Diaspora (Carolina Academic Press, 2015), and Women and the Nigeria-Biafra War: Reframing Gender and Conflict in Africa (co-edited with Sussie Aham-Okoro, Lexington Books, 2020). She has contributed numerous book chapters, such as “Colonialism and African Womanhood” in The Palgrave Handbook of African Colonial and Postcolonial History (2018), and articles including “Igbo Women and Political Participation in Nigeria, 1800s–2005” (International Journal of African Historical Studies, 2009). Chuku has received the Lipitz Professor of the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences award at UMBC (2020–2021), the Ali Mazrui Award for Scholarship and Research Excellence (2017), West African Research Association Post-Doctoral Fellowship (2012), and multiple grants from UMBC, CODESRIA, and others. Her scholarship is recognized in Toyin Falola’s In Praise of Greatness (2019) as exemplifying African women intellectuals.