Chukwudi Collins Nkemdirim
Entry Year: 2025
Education
B.A. in English and Literary Studies from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka
Chukwudi earned a B.A. in English and Literary Studies from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, graduating with Second Class Honours (Upper Division) in 2021. His undergraduate thesis, The Culpability of the African Natives in Aphra Behn's Oroonoko and Yaa Gyasi's Homegoing, explored African agency and complicity in the transatlantic slave trade and contributed to his early engagement with historical memory and resistance in literature.
Research Focus
Chukwudi’s doctoral research explores how slavery - both as a historical system and a legacy - has impacted the environment, and how literature represents and interrogates this entanglement. He examines how writers across African, African diasporic, and African American traditions depict the ecological consequences of slavery and its afterlives. Through attention to nonhuman perspectives, land use, extractive economies, and inherited trauma, his work investigates how literature captures the environmental fallout of racialized exploitation. Drawing on interdisciplinary approaches from the environmental humanities, postcolonial studies, and critical theory, Chukwudi’s research contributes to evolving conversations around ecological justice and historical memory in Black writing globally.
His broader interests include African diasporic literature, postcolonial studies, Afrofuturism, and environmental justice literature.
