Purity Ada Uchechukwu (born 1971) is a Nigerian Hispanist, an associate professor of Spanish at the Department of Modern European Languages, Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka. Her linguistic research focuses on the Afro-Hispanic people, Spanish as a second language and its role in Africa and the United States. Uchechukwu is one of the motivating forces behind Hispanist scholarship in English-speaking

sub-Saharan Africa Sub-Saharan Africa is, geographically, the area and regions of the continent of Africa that lies south of the Sahara. These include West Africa, East Africa, Central Africa, and Southern Africa. Geopolitically, in addition to the List of sov ...

Early life and education

Purity Ada Uchechukwu was born in Lagos, Nigera, in 1971. After graduating with a master's degree in Spanish from the University of Bamberg, she obtained a doctorate from the university in 2010, focusing on philology of Romance languages and writing her thesis on "A Corpus-Based Analysis of Igbo and Spanish Copula Verbs."

Career

Uchechukwu returned to Nigeria to work as a Spanish professor at Nnamdi Azikiwe University, in its Department of Modern European Languages. She is the editor of the university's peer-reviewed ''Journal of Modern European Language and Literatures''. Her research focuses on teaching Spanish as a second language and on Spanish in the United States. In 2014, she contributed to the Instituto Cervantes' book ''La enseñanza del español en África Subsahariana'' ("The Teaching of Spanish in Sub-Saharan Africa"), writing on the status of the Spanish language in Nigeria. She is a member of the

American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese The American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese is a language-specific professional association in the United States that was founded on December 29, 1917, in New York City as the American Association of Teachers of Spanish. The na ...

and serves on the board of Open Journals Nigeria. Her role as a Hispanist researcher in an English-speaking sub-Saharan African country distinguishes her, as she explores in her 2017 paper "Spanish in Sub-Saharan Africa: Whither Nigeria?" She is married to Chinedu Uchechukwu, a fellow professor at Nnamdi Azikiwe University.

Selected works

* "A Corpus-Based Analysis of Igbo and Spanish Copula Verbs," doctoral thesis, 2010 * "Spanish in the United States as an Example of the Interaction between Language, Politics and Ethnicity," ''UJAH: Unizik Journal of Arts and Humanities'', 2011 * "The Transitivity of Psych Verbs in Spanish and Igbo" in ''The Transitivity Problem of the Igbo Verb'', 2012 * "La situación del español en Nigeria" in ''La enseñanza del español en África Subsahariana'', 2014 * "The Prototypical Igbo Copula Verb," ''Igbo Language Studies Series'', 2015 * "Afro-Hispanics and Self-Identity: The Gods to the Rescue?," ''Ogirisi: A New Journal of African Studies'', 2016 * "Spanish in Sub-Saharan Africa: Whither Nigeria?," ''UJAH: Unizik Journal of Arts and Humanities'', 2017 * "A Proposal for Afro-Hispanic Peoples and Culture as General Studies Course in African Universities," ''Humanities'', 2019 * "Is Spanish as a Heritage Language in the US Endangered?," ''International Journal of Humanities & Social Studies'', 2019

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Uchechukwu, Purity Ada 1971 births Nigerian women academics Nigerian women writers Women linguists Spanish-language education University of Bamberg alumni Hispanists Living people Academic staff of Nnamdi Azikiwe University