Anene Ejikeme,
Ph.D.

At the beginning of 2023, The Associated Colleges of the South (ACS) selected you to be a Mellon Foundation Academic Leadership Fellow. Firstly, Congratulations on this prestigious honor! What does this fellowship mean to you and what impact do you hope it will have on your future work?

The ACS Mellon fellowship gives me the opportunity to contribute to Trinity in a different way.   Previously, my focus was on teaching, mentoring, and research. In this new role, I have the opportunity to make recommendations at the institutional level to highlight things that drive student success.

Trinity is a very special place, where many, many people are committed to the wellbeing and success of our students. Every time I walk around campus, I am reminded how lucky our students and all of us are to be here. I want every student who chooses TU to be able to appreciate how special this place is, to grow in ways expected and unexpected, and to make wonderful memories here. To learn on such a beautiful campus with brilliant teachers and a dedicated staff is such a gift.  

With such incredible resources, we want all our students to flourish. There are already several initiatives and programs that specifically target student success.  My job is to help with this work. More specifically, my job involves speaking with students, staff and faculty and also collecting data -- quantitative as well as qualitative -- and reading the literature on student success.  So I am learning a tremendous amount.  And many of the things that I am learning, I will take back to the classroom.  Before my return to the classroom, I will present my recommendations to the administration.

You have affiliations in a variety of departments including African American Studies, History, International Studies, and Women and Gender Studies. How has the interdisciplinarity in your work enhanced it and what suggestions do you have for others who hope to conduct interdisciplinary research?

Several years ago, I taught in the FYE program, alongside five other colleagues, all non-historians, to develop the course “Food Matters.” It was extremely exciting for me because I was introduced to literature that I would not ordinarily have encountered and I was able to bring a historical perspective to the course, something my colleagues embraced. 

I think the notion of “interdisciplinarity” can be a complicated one because the borders separating the disciplines are not always so straightforward.  For example, a historian might be trained in statistics and be a “cliometrician,” employing methods that colleagues in the department do not use or even understand!  At a very basic level, we could say that all the fields with “studies”  in their name such as Women and Gender Studies (WAGS) and African American Studies are interdisciplinary by nature.  All these fields have particular histories that we can trace. Area studies (African Studies, Middle East Studies etc) emerged during the Cold War. Black Studies (which included African history) and Women’s Studies emerged in the 1960s.  Before the 1960s, almost no universities or colleges in the US offered African history. History as an academic discipline is usually traced to 19th century Germany. It was also, of course, in the 19th century that the social sciences emerged. You will find that some history departments are housed with the social sciences while at other colleges and universities, such as here, history is with the humanities.  

African history is typically interdisciplinary.  And I would argue that African history has been a pioneer in this regard.  

My advice to anyone interested in doing interdisciplinary work is to (1) get involved in FYE, (2) go to the monthly Humanitea in the Humanities Collective and (3) attend the faculty research presentations. 

Much of your research hinges on issues of identity ranging from the varied identities of women across Africa to the first Nigerian heavyweight boxing champion of the world, Hogan 'Kid' Bassey. What has your exploration of this topic taught you about how identity is discussed in academia and about your own identities?

Let me begin with the boxer, Hogan Bassey, whose life I am currently writing about. He was born in Nigeria and was a member of the Efik ethnic group.  He spent several formative years in Lagos. Then he moved to Liverpool, England, where he lived for almost a decade, starting a family there. When he won the world featherweight title, he was at the time British Commonwealth champion.  So this is a man that many different people could claim as one of their own -- the Efik, Lagosians, Nigerians, Liverpudlians, the British, and even members of the Commonwealth.  How did Bassey see himself?  That’s a big question and one of the issues I am exploring!

Identities are complicated because life is complicated: no person has just a single identity.  I have a colleague who loves to note that in the US he is Jewish, in France he is American and in Mali he is white.  I am a mother, a sister, a daughter, a friend, a wife, a professor of African history, a learner, and many other things. I was born in Nigeria but it was not until I got to the UK that being Black became something with which I identified. I also went from being a Protestant to being a Catholic -- I was baptised twice. Not at the same time! 

Paying attention to identities can be a way to include.  It can also be a way to exclude. For a Black student -- or for that matter, a Black professor -- at a place like Trinity, having an identity as a Black person can be a challenge. Challenges, however, are not inherently bad.   

I really truly believe that diversity is the most wonderful thing in the world.  I love to read and to meet people and to travel because I love to learn about other ways of thinking and being.  I cannot imagine living in a world in which everyone thinks like me and behaves like me.  For me, that would be either hell or purgatory!

We hear all the time that people prefer to live amongst those who are most like themselves.  I think that is a bit simplistic because two people can be very alike in one way and very different in others. Sometimes in the effort to create community, we suppress aspects of ourselves to fit into what we think is expected.  And then it turns out that others are doing the same thing!  So it seems to me a better way is to embrace the strength, beauty and joy in diversity.  

In addition to researching issues of identity, your work also is centered around African History, which is multifaceted and varied depending on region. What excites you most about African History and what are some of the most salient lessons you have picked up through your exploration? 

I don’t even know where to begin! Because African history is still so little known, it is exciting to introduce people to African history.  For a very long time, the idea that Africa had no history and that Africans had always lived in the same way as their ancestors until the coming of Europeans was very pervasive. That idea is still there. It is not just foreigners who hold these views; you find that Africas too  -- including those who are otherwise well-educated! --often know little or no African history.  There is a powerful scene in a film I often use in class, “Keita,” in which you see schoolchildren in Mali learning about Christopher Columbus and Rene Dumont in a school where Malian history is not on the curriculum.  

Another aspect of African history that excites me are the connections between Africa and Africans and other parts of the world. The other side of the belief that Africa has no history is that Africa had no connections with other parts of the world until Europeans arrived. Last year I taught a course on the African diaspora where we read about African elites in seventeenth century India and ordinary African artisans in premodern England.  

Africa is a huge continent of enormous diversity yet we find that it is often reduced to a single thing. African food. African music. I encourage students to take more history courses, African, but not just African. It is vital to study the past in order to understand the present. Today, there are debates about whether we should teach history, with all its warts.  This is happening not just in the US. It is a global phenomenon. There is no country on earth whose history is not a mix of the good and the bad. We need to be able to look at all of it, honestly.