Dr Terri Ochiagha
Lecturer in Global Anglophone Literatures
- Department of English Literature
- School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures
Contact details
Address
- Street
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Department of English
University of Edinburgh
50 George Square
Edinburgh
EH8 9LH - City
- Post code
Background
Dr Terri Ochiagha is a Lecturer in Global Anglophone Literatures at the University of Edinburgh, a Non-Residential Fellow at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Studies at Harvard University, and a Senior Member of Robinson College, University of Cambridge. She is currently the world-leading expert on the work of Chinua Achebe. Her first book, Achebe and Friends at Umuahia: The Making of a Literary Elite (2015) won the Fage & Oliver Prize of the African Studies Association, UK for the most outstanding academic book on Africa in the years 2014-2015. Her second book, A Short History of Things Fall Apart, was published in 2018.
In 2024, she began working on Chinua Achebe: A Life at the Crossroads, Achebe’s first full-length biography for Princeton University Press and is in the final stages of editing Achebe in Context (Cambridge University Press), a volume of 22 essays commissioned from a number of literary critics, historians, art historians, and anthropologists.
In the past two years, Dr Ochiagha has held some of the world’s most prestigious fellowships and scholarly residencies. In 2025, she held the McMillan-Stewart Fellowship at the Hutchins Center, Harvard University, and a Visiting Fellowship at All Souls College, University of Oxford. This year, she spent the Lent and Easter Terms at Robinson College, University of Cambridge, as the Baxandall Fellow. She spent April at the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center in Lake Como as one of the global leaders and trailblazers selected by the Rockefeller Foundation for its renowned residency programme.
Her research in 2025-2026 has been generously funded by the British Academy. Dr Ochiagha has had the privilege of receiving other British Academy grants throughout her career: a British Academy/Leverhulme Trust Small Grant (which funded travel to the US in 2024-2025 for her Achebe biography), a British Academy Conference Grant (with which she organised and fully funded the speakers at her Achebe Redivivus Conference at All Souls College, University of Oxford in 2025), and a British Academy Newton International Fellowship (in 2014-2015, which recruits the world’s most outstanding talent to begin an academic career in the UK).
In January 2027, she will return to the University of Cambridge as Smuts Visiting Fellow in Commonwealth Studies.
Dr Ochiagha would be interested in supervising well-qualified PhD students working on biography, any aspect of life-writing , the work of Chinua Achebe, first-generation Nigerian writing, or elite colonial education in British Africa. She is currently not accepting any projects that deviate from these specific demarcations and does not respond to unsolicited requests for supervision and/or mentorship from postdoctoral researchers .
For all commercial publishing, film, and media inquiries, as well as non-university speaking engagements please contact her agents at
Qualifications
BA, MA, PhD, Complutense University, Madrid
Undergraduate teaching
Postgraduate teaching
Open to PhD supervision enquiries?
Yes