[1] She is the Jack and Margaret Sweet Endowed Professor of History[2] and the Associate Dean for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in the College of Social Science[3] at Michigan State University.
Her first book, Farmers, Traders, Warriors, and Kings: Female Power and Authority in Northern Igboland, 1900–1960, was published by Heinemann in 2005.
Heralded as a “landmark in African historiography”[9] by Distinguished Professor and author, Isidore Okpewho, and "a major event in African gender studies publishing,"[10] by Chancellor Professor and feminist scholar, Obioma Nnaemeka, Achebe's Farmers, Traders, Warriors, and Kings represents an important contribution to understanding gender and women's history in Africa, as well as political and religious change in the colonial period.
[1] A significant and sustained intervention into debates over feminist historical methodology, the book centers what Achebe theorizes as the “female spiritual principle” and northern Igbo women's lives in ways that existing texts on Igbo history do not, by presenting both as active participants in the making of northern Igboland.
As a piece of scholarship, Farmers, Traders, Warriors, and Kings is unsurpassed in its engagement with indigenous meaning, interpretation and understanding.
[14] Laura Seay of The Washington Post, writes of Female Monarchs and Merchant Queens in Africa, “A brilliant, thoroughly engaging and accessible book, ‘Female Monarchs and Merchant Queens in Africa’ is a fascinating and quick read that shows the many, many ways that women across the African continent have always led and continue to lead.
Finally, Achebe makes a welcome contribution to efforts to bring analysis of queer identities to African Studies, showing definitively that notions of gender and sexuality have long been fluid and adaptable on the continent.