Juliana Makuchi Nfah-Abbenyi

Bio

Dr. Juliana Makuchi Nfah-Abbenyi is Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature and Associate Dean of Faculty and Staff Development and Success of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at NC State University.

The College of Humanities and Social Sciences is one of the three largest colleges at NC State in terms of student headcount. The mission of the college is to serve the residents of North Carolina and meet the challenges of the 21st century by educating our students to be future leaders and responsible citizens with a distinctive willingness to engage in the life of their communities, their state, and their nation. The college offers baccalaureate, master’s and doctoral degrees in a wide range of traditional and professional disciplines; it serves business, industry, government, public education, and individual citizens of the state through teaching, research, and engagement. These programs are carried out in ten academic units. Currently, the college employs 225 tenured/tenure track faculty, 239 professional track faculty, 97 staff, and 383 graduate teaching and research assistants.

The College aims to support, strengthen, and advance faculty and staff excellence, providing college-level initiatives that address key faculty and staff issues and increase belongingness. Dr. Nfah-Abbenyi helps fulfil the priorities in the college’s new strategic plan (go.nsu.edu/chassplan), bringing vision to sustain and develop innovative initiatives that support faculty and staff success within and outside the classroom.

Dr. Nfah-Abbenyi is the author of Gender in African Women’s Writing: Identity, Sexuality, and Difference, Your Madness, Not Mine: Stories of Cameroon, The Sacred Door and Other Stories: Cameroon Folktales of the Beba, and Reflections: An Anthology of New Works by African Women Poets, edited with Anthonia Kalu and Omofolabo Ajayi-Soyinka. She served as Co-editor of a special double issue of Journal des Africanistes 80.1-2 (2010) on “Création littéraire et archives de la mémoire/Literary Creation and the Archives of Memory” and as Guest Editor of special journal issues, including: The Global South 5.2 (2011) on “Indigenous Knowledge and Intellectual Property Rights in the Age of Globalization”; Free Verse 22 (2012) on “Anglophone Cameroonian Poetry”; Tydskrif vir Letterkunde (Journal for Literature) 53.1 (2016) on “Cameroon Literature”; JALA: Journal of the African Literature Association 13.1 (2019) on “The Environments of African Literature”; JALA 14.2 (2020) on “Fragmented Nation or the Anglophone-Francophone Problem in Cameroon.”

Dr. Nfah-Abbenyi writes fiction under the pen name Makuchi. Her short story, “Woman of the Lake,” about the 1986 Lake Nyos disaster that devastated and wiped out entire communities in the North West Region of Cameroon was nominated for the Pushcart Prize and “Land of My Dreams” about the ongoing war in Cameroon was selected for Honorable Mention in the 2023 Best Short Story award category of the African Literature Association. Some folktales in The Sacred Door and Other Stories: Cameroon Folktales of the Beba have been translated into Dutch and her book of short stories, Your Madness, Not Mine: Stories of Cameroon has been translated into Italian.

See her CV for more publications, invited lectures, fiction readings, interviews, conference presentations and other university, state, national and international activities and engagements.