Terri Ochiagha

Dr Terri Ochiagha is a literary critic and cultural historian and a world-leading expert on the work of the ‘father of modern African Literature’, Chinua Achebe. She also works on the history and literary representations of elite colonial education in British Africa. She holds a B.A., M.A., and PhD in English from Complutense University, Madrid. Her first book, Achebe and Friends at Umuahia: The Making of a Literary Elite (2015) won the African Studies Association of the UK’s inaugural Fage&Oliver Prize for the most outstanding book on Africa published in 2014-2015. She is also the author of A Short History of Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart (2018).

In January 2024, she began working on the first-full length biography of Chinua Achebe, Chinua Achebe: A Life at the Crossroads, under contract with Princeton University Press. The project has received funding from the British Academy/Leverhulme Trust and Princeton University Press. In addition, Dr Ochiagha is also editing Chinua Achebe in Context, a collection of 24 newly-commissioned essays, for Cambridge University Press.

In 2025, she will be a McMillan-Stewart Fellow at the Hutchins Centre of African & African American Research at Harvard University, from which she will go on to take up a Visiting Fellowship at All Souls College, University of Oxford.

Dr Ochiagha’s academic career in the UK began with the award of a prestigious British Academy Newton International Fellowship, which recruits the best postdoctoral researchers across all relevant disciplines from around the world. She has held positions in various UK universities, including King’s College London, where she was a Teaching Fellow in the History of Modern Africa, and the University of Oxford, where she has—at various times—been a Senior Associate Member of St Antony’s College, Visiting Researcher at the African Studies Centre, and tutor in Postcolonial African Literatures at Wycliffe Hall.

She is currently a Lecturer in the Department of English and Scottish Literature at the University of Edinburgh.