In 2022, Uju Anya, a Nigerian-born lecturer, provoked international controversy when she used her verified Twitter handle to insult late Queen Elizabeth II’s health condition hours before her death.
The Professor fired several harsh shots at the British empire and the prominent role played by the late Queen Elizabeth II in a series of now-deleted tweets, expecting that her death would be excruciatingly “excruciating.”
Uju accused Queen Elizabeth II of supporting the “genocide” that forced her family to flee.
In another tweet, she asserted that the British empire supplied the Nigerian government with arms and ammunition during the country’s civil war, which lasted from 1967 to 1970.
Her tweet generated a barrage of responses, both criticism and retaliation.
Below are five things to know about Professor Uju Anya;
1. Dr. Uju Anya is a university professor in the Department of Modern Languages at Carnegie Mellon University. She teaches and researches in applied linguistics, critical sociolinguistics, and critical discourse studies, focusing on race, gender, sexual, and social class identities in new language learning through the experiences of African American students.
2. Anya previously worked at major institutions such as Penn State University, the University of Southern California, and Dartmouth College.
3. She earned a Bachelor of Arts in Roman languages from Dartmouth College. Uju Anya got her master’s degree in Brazilian studies at Brown University and her doctorate in applied linguistics at UCLA.
4. In 2021, the Nigerian Professor, who had legally split from her spouse in 2017, declared on Twitter that she had recently finalized her divorce with him, thereby officially announcing her lesbian identity. The Professor stated on Twitter that her ex-husband was aware of her sexuality before they married, although she assumed she was bisexual at the time.
5. She is of Nigerian and Trinidadian descent. Her parents met while attending university in England. They married and relocated to Enugu, Nigeria. But, once her father married another woman, her mother escaped to America with her small children.
