Uju Anya is a Nigerian-born Professor of applied linguistics and researcher who works at Carnegie Mellon University. Her critical discourse studies primarily examine how African American students’ viewpoints on race, gender, sexual orientation, and social class affect their ability to learn a new language. She was born on August 4, 1976, to a Trinidadian mother and a Nigerian father. Enugu is where Uju was born and raised. Uju is renowned for her allyship with the LGBTQ community. After divorcing her husband, she came out in public as a lesbian.
Career
Uju started her career in 1998 as a Teaching Fellow at the Phillips Academy Andover, where she continues to work today as an introductory and intermediate Spanish immersion teacher for high school students.
She began serving the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Dartmouth College as a visiting lecturer in the Portuguese language in the year 2001. In this role, Uju was in charge of coordinating the pedagogy and curriculum for the Portuguese program. This involved the use of cutting-edge multimedia resources, research, a social focus, and an emphasis on Afro-Brazilian culture in critical language studies.
Uju started working as a Master Teacher at the Rassias Center for World Languages and Cultures in the year 2003. She created and conducted Portuguese Language Immersion courses for American executives in Brazil as well as English Language Immersion courses for executives in Tokyo, Japan.
From 2005 to 2007, Uju was employed as a Lecturer of Spanish and Portuguese Languages at the UCLA Department of Spanish and Portuguese.
She then started working as a lecturer at the UCLA Department of Applied Linguistics, where she was in charge of both that department’s courses as well as teaching English to speakers of other languages (TESL). Uju’s duties in that position included training graduate and undergraduate students in academic writing and research techniques, applied linguistics, TESL, and service-learning in TESL courses.
At addition to his other duties, Uju was appointed assistant professor of clinical education in the College of Education at Pennsylvania State University.
In 2016, Uju was appointed to a job as an assistant professor in the division of curriculum and instruction research affiliate at the Pennsylvania State University’s center for the study of higher education.
She currently serves as Professor of Second Language Acquisition in Carnegie Mellon University’s Department of Modern Languages Associate.
- Education
- 2011 Ph.D., Applied Linguistics
- University of California, Los Angeles
- 2001 M.A., Brazilian Studies
- Brown University
- 1998 B.A., Romance Languages
- Dartmouth College
Marriage
Uju got divorced after being married. She had two kids with her ex-boyfriend. Uju announced her separation from her hubby on Twitter, writing that they had recently finalized the necessary paperwork. She also stated that she is single and does not intend to get married.
Controversy
Uju Anya tweeted something that many people found insulting on September 8, 2022, the day after Queen Elizabeth II passed away. She got entangled in a web of scandal as a result of this.
In tweet swiftly deleted by Twitter for violation of the microblogging platform’s terms of service, the feisty professor described the late Queen as:
“a chief monarch of a thieving, raping, and genocidal empire.”
She wrote:
“I heard the chief monarch of a thieving ra*ping genocidal empire is finally dying. May her pain be excruciating.”
The message received a lot of negative feedback from the Twitter community, some of whom found her views to be disrespectful.
Honors and Awards
- 2020 Penn State College of Education Outstanding Teaching Award
- 2019 American Association for Applied Linguistics First Book Award
- 2019 ACTFL/Middlebury Research Forum Invited Scholar
- 2015 USC Rossier School of Education Faculty Teaching and Mentoring Award
- 2010 Dartmouth College Thurgood Marshall Dissertation Fellowship
- 2010 UCLA Graduate Division Dissertation Year Fellowship (declined)
- 2008 Centro Latino for Literacy Manos Amigas Volunteer of the Year Award
- 2007 Eugene Cota-Robles Fellowship for Doctoral Studies at UCLA
- 1999 Irene Diamond Fellowship for Graduate Study at Brown University
- 1998 Phillips Academy Andover Spanish Teaching Fellowship