On Thursday afternoon, Professor Uju Anya took to her verified Twitter handle to mock late Queen Elizabeth II health condition hours before her death.
The longest-serving British monarch was at the time in critical medical condition at the Buckingham Palace.
In a series of now-deleted tweets, the Professor fired several damning shots at the British empire and the reported influential role played by the late Queen Elizabeth II in the Nigerian civil war, which spanned 1967 – 1970,
hoping that her death would be painfully “excruciating.”
Uju accused Queen Elizabeth II of sponsoring the “genocide” that led to her family being displaced.
In another tweet, she referenced the alleged role of the British empire in supplying the Nigerian government with arms and ammunition during the nation’s civil war.
Expectedly, her cold-hearted wish attracted a flurry of global reactions, outrage, flaks, criticisms and backlash, with her University disowning and insisting her ‘offensive’ and ‘objectionable’ statements on the Queen do not represent their values.
Prominent billionaire, Jeff Bezos slammed Prof Anya for her tweet on The Queen, with the Amazon founder quoting Anya’s tweet and retorting, “This is someone supposedly working to make the world better?” “I don’t think so,” Bezos added.
But Anya went theatrical and responding told Bezos “May everyone you and your merciless greed have harmed in this world remember you as fondly as I remember my colonisers.”
Below are 7 things to know about Professor Uju Anya ~
1. Literary ‘amazon’, Prof. Anya teaches in the Modern Languages Department at Carnegie Mellon University as an associate professor of second language acquisition. Her research is 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.
2 Before working at Carnegie Mellon University, Anya served in other prestigious institutions, including Penn State University, University of Southern California and Dartmouth College.
3 She graduated from Dartmouth College with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Roman languages. Uju Anya earned her Masters degree in Brazilian studies from Brown University and did her PhD in applied linguistics from UCLA.
4 In 2021, the Nigerian lesbian Professor who had legally separated from her husband in 2017, announced on Twitter that she had just finalised her divorce with her husband, thus openly revealing that she is lesbian. In a statement released on Twitter, the US- based lesbian Nigerian scholar wrote that her ex-husband knew of her sexuality before they got married, but she only thought at the time she was bisexual.
5 A very vocal & proud lesbian who divorced her husband in favour of lesbianism, Prof Anya has expertise in diversity, equity, and inclusion in instructional practices and curriculum design, applied linguistics as a practice of social justice, intercultural communication, as well as service-learning and civic engagement in secondary and university-level language programs.
6 Her contributions to academics & scholarship speak for themselves and loudly, too. For instance, 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, recognising a scholar whose first book represents outstanding work that makes an exceptional contribution to the field. The book is the first single-authored volume of sociolinguistic analysis and critical examination of the African American experience in language learning. It examines how students shape and negotiate different identities in multilingual contexts, and it proposes how a multilingual approach (e.g. translanguaging, plurilingual practice) can be utilised for effective language pedagogy. Her second book, a co-edited volume titled ‘Racial equity on college campuses: Connecting research to practice’, was released by SUNY Press at the end of 2021. She was an assistant professor of second language learning in Curriculum and Instruction at Penn State University, assistant professor of teacher education in TESOL at the University of Southern California; visiting assistant professor and faculty director of the Dartmouth College Portuguese language study abroad program in Salvador-Bahia, Brazil; and lecturer in applied linguistics, TESOL, Portuguese, and Spanish at UCLA and Dartmouth College.
7 She is from both Nigerian/Trinidadian origin. Her parents met at the University in England. They got married and moved to Enugu Nigeria. However, after her father took in another wife, her mother took her young children and fled to America.
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