Isidore Okpewho, distinguished professor of Africana Studies, was honored with an appointment to the Nigerian National Order of Merit, the highest honor conferred on scholars judged the most accomplished in their fields by a panel of peers. The award, conferred by President of Nigeria Goodluck Jonathan, notes that it is the 鈥渉ighest National Prize for Academic and Intellectual attainment.鈥 Okpewho was also declared winner of the Fonlon-Nichols Prize of the African Literature Association in 2011, for creative writing judged the most outstanding from the previous year, for his fourth novel, Call Me By My Rightful Name, a story of the African sources of African-American identity and of backgrounds to the establishment of the discipline of Black/African-American Studies in U.S. universities.
Isidore Okpewho
January 25, 2012