Dr Terri Ochiagha is a Lecturer in Global Anglophone Literatures at the University of Edinburgh and a Non-Resident Fellow of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard and a world-leading scholar on the work of the acclaimed ‘father of African literature,’ Chinua Achebe. She is also passionate about English modernist literature and the genre of biography more broadly. Dr. Ochiagha’s first scholarly monograph, Achebe and Friends at Umuahia: The Making of a Literary Elite (2015) won the inaugural Fage & Oliver Prize for the most outstanding book on Africa in 2016. She is currently working on Chinua Achebe: A Life at the Crossroads, the author’s first full-length biography, which will be published by Princeton University Press, and is editing a volume of 23 essays, Achebe in Context, for Cambridge University Press. In July 2025, she convened a British Academy Conference, Achebe Redivivus, at All Souls College, University of Oxford.

Dr Ochiagha took up a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship in September 2025. In the past two years, she has received the support of the British Academy (Small Grant and Conference Grant schemes), Princeton University Press (Global Equity Grant), as well as departmental funding. She was also the McMillan-Stewart Fellow at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, Harvard University, in Spring 2025, and a Visiting Fellow at All Souls College, University of Oxford, in Trinity Term 2025.