Alumni Highlight

ISHR congratulates Chinonye Alma Otuonye on her acceptance into the Cultural Anthropology PhD program at CUNY.

Chinonye is a 2017 graduate of the Human Rights Studies M.A. program at Columbia University with a focus on gender and nationhood.  Her thesis focused on the ways in which the formulation of the Nigerian-Biafran War as a moment of black liberation functioned as a humanization process for the black man that relegated the black woman to the invisible. She examined how African women authors sought to reinsert themselves into that historical narrative through a literary reframing of the struggle.

While at Columbia, she had the opportunity to present her research on notions of home within the Igbo identity after the Biafran War in Tokyo, Japan at the 2016 CAAS conference and will be presenting her master’s thesis at Rutgers at their annual Global Affairs conference in April 2017.

Chinonye currently works as the Development and Communication Coordinator at Harlem Grown, a NGO focused on alleviating poverty through food justice and urban agriculture. She will be beginning her PhD in the fall of 2017.