It was at this time that Umezurike became interested in English literature as a way to fend off boredom, as well as to cope with the terror and despair he experienced during the tyrannical Sani Abacha regime of the 1990s.
[4] Umezurike’s academic career began when he attended in the University of Port Harcourt to pursue a master’s degree in English Literature.
[5] His interest in researching how representations of gender in Nigerian Literature are informed by ideologies and norms that define how society should recognize, relate to, and accept or even affirm people led him to join the Ph.D. in English at Film Studies program at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada.
Under the supervision of Lahoucine Ouzgane, he completed his doctoral dissertation in 2021, focusing on representations of gender and sexuality in novels by Igbo authors with an eye toward images of men and women who have reimagined, enforced, or even challenged masculinity.
[7] Following the completion of his graduate studies, Umezurike became the inaugural recipient of the University of Calgary’s Provost’s Postdoctoral Awards for Indigenous and Black Scholars.