Izuu Nwankwọ
Assistant Professor, Centre for Drama, Theatre & Performance Studies
Izuu Nwankwọ is a theatre scholar, teacher, playwright and essayist whose research interests revolve around African and African diaspora theatre, performances and popular culture. He received his PhD from the University of Ibadan and was previously a research fellow at the Department of Anthropology and African Studies (IFEAS), Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, Germany, where he worked on the popularity and global dissemination of African popular arts through social media under the research project group, CEDITRAA.
Nwankwọ is a Georg Foerster Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Germany; Iso Lomso Fellow of the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Studies (STIAS), South Africa; and a double recipient of the American Council for Learned Societies’ African Humanities Program (AHP) fellowships dissertation-completion and post-doctoral research awards. He is a recipient of the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Center Residency Program, Italy; and visiting scholar of the Department of Anthropology and African Studies, Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, Germany and of the Centre d’Enseignement et de Recherche en Etudes Postcoloniales, University of Liège, Belgium.
Nwankwọ’s scholarly book publications are Yabbing and Wording: The Artistry of Nigerian Stand-up Comedy (NISC Press, 2021); the edited volume, Stand-up Comedy in Africa: Humour in Popular Languages and Media (ibidem Verlag 2022), and the co-authored work (with Daniel Hammett and Laura S. Martin) Humour and Politics in Africa: Beyond Resistance (Bristol University Press, 2023). He translated Chinua Achebe’s novel, Things Fall Apart (1958) into the Igbo language in 2007 and has published stage plays as well as academic essays on African and African diaspora theatre, performance and literature.
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