Degrees

Duke University, PhD

Biography

Professor Ifeoma C. Kiddoe Nwankwo earned her Ph.D. from Duke University in 1999, and comes to Vanderbilt from the University of Michigan, where she was Associate Professor of English and African and Afroamerican Studies. She specializes in nineteenth and twentieth century U.S. African American and Caribbean literature and culture (including that from the portions of Central and South America that border the Caribbean Sea). For this work, Dr. Nwankwo has been awarded fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the DeWitt-Wallace Foundation, and the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation.

Her book, Black Cosmopolitanism: Racial Consciousness, and Transnational Identity in the Nineteenth-Century Americas (University of Pennsylvania Press, Spring 2005), is a comparative study of people of African descent in Cuba, the U.S., and the British West Indies in the wake of the Haitian Revolution. In it, she reveals that fear fostered by the revolution determined and has continued to determine the ways African-descended peoples in this hemisphere relate to each other, as well as to other American populations. This research has implications for the analysis of relations between U.S. African Americans and recent immigrants to the U.S.

Professor Nwankwo has also published articles on the portrayal of Latin America in the novels of U.S. African American writers Gayl Jones and Martin Delany, on the mechanics of memory in Panamanian West Indian writing, on the politics of intra-racial translation in Langston Hughes’ translations of Nicolas Guillen’s poetry, and on Zora Neale Hurston’s ethnographic engagement with the Caribbean. Her current projects use literary critical as well as ethnographic methodologies to explore vernacular poetry, popular culture and music, and memory-making.
As a teacher, Professor Nwankwo enacts her belief that it is crucial that U.S. students grasp the historical and contemporary realities of the many cultured worlds within and beyond the United States and engage in hands-on, eyes-on, and ears-on learning. Hearing about an event or experience is one thing. Talking to someone who was there or who lived it is quite another.