Uju Anya: 5 things to know about her

UK-based Nigerian professor, Uju Anya set the internet on fire on Thursday night, September 8, after she tweeted what many considered a vile tweet hours before Queen Elizabeth II passed away.

She followed this up with another tweet saying that anyone expecting her to mourn the demise of the British monarch should keep wishing upon a star.

Here are a few things to know about the controversial professor.

Table of Content hide 1Biography 2Education 3Lesbian and Proud 4Not New To Controversies 5Selected Awards and Achievements

Biography

Uju Anya was born on August 4, 1976. She has a Nigerian father, while her mother is from Trinidad and Tobago. The 56-year-old was born and bred in Enugu state, Nigeria.

Her mother allegedly ran away with her to the US when Uju was about age 10 to escape maltreatment from her father, who had taken another wife.

Uju Anya, a feminist to the core, smokes and is an antiracist who has not hidden her deep-seated hatred for colonialism.

ALSO READ: Queen Elizabeth II: Jeff Bezos slams UK-based Nigerian professor over vile tweet

Education

Professor Uju Anya is an Associate Professor at Carnegie Mellon University, United Kingdom. She is a researcher in applied linguistics, critical sociolinguistics, and critical discourse studies, primarily examining race, gender, sexual, and social class identities in new language learning through the experiences of African American students.

Uju Anya bagged a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Romance languages from Dartmouth College in 1998 before obtaining an MA in Brazilian studies from Brown University in 2001. Also, in 2011, she was awarded a PhD in applied linguistics from UCLA.

Lesbian and Proud

Professor Uju was once married before she got divorced. Although she has two children from her previous union, she has publicly declared she’s a lesbian and throws her support firmly behind the LGBTQ movement.

In a tweet in 2020, Uju revealed via a tweet that she had always dated and maintained relationships with women, and even had a live-in female partner in Brazil prior to falling in love and marrying her ex-husband.

She added that her ex-husband was well aware of all these facts and that she left her marriage after discovering she was a lesbian, not a bi-sexual.

Not New To Controversies

Prof Uju Anya belongs to the Vawulence department, and the recent tweet by the university don is not her first time courting controversies, especially as regards dead celebrities.

Uju Anya, via a Twitter post, said she wished Queen Elizabeth II some agonising painful death; a tweet that went viral and drew widespread condemnation from far and near, including from Amazon boss, Jeff Bezos.

On Jun 6, 2021, she tweeted, “Celebrating the well-deserved death of lying thieving charlatan TB Joshua, who cheated💰millions💰out of people in their most desperate days with fake prophecies and cruel promises of miracles and cures for diseases from which he couldn’t even save his sorry self. Rot in piss.”

She called the late clergyman a ruthless liar who stole from the poor who begged and borrowed to pay him for his miracle scams.

ALSO READ: 15 things you didn’t know about Queen Elizabeth II

According to her, she will speak ill of the dead and even dance on their grave if they made life choices that harmed people and caused destruction.

Selected Awards and Achievements

Some of the selected awards that professor Uju Anya has won include the following;

• Penn State College of Education Outstanding Teaching Award, 2020
• American Association for Applied Linguistics First Book Award, 2019
• ACTFL/Middlebury Research Forum Invited Scholar, 2019
• USC Rossier School of Education Faculty Teaching and Mentoring Award, 2015
• Centro Latino for Literacy Manos Amigas Volunteer of the Year Award, 2008

Furthermore, her book “Racialized identities in second language learning: Speaking blackness in Brazil (Routledge 2017)” won the 2019 American Association for Applied Linguistics First Book Award for her outstanding work and exceptional contribution the book makes to the field.