Uju Anya

Uju Anya (born c.1976) is an academic of applied linguistics. She is associate professor of applied linguistics at Carnegie Mellon University
Early life and family
Anya was born in Nigeria c. 1976 and has described herself as "a child of Igbo land" as her father is from the Igbo people. Her parents met in England while at university and were living in Nigeria at the time of the Biafran Civil War. Her mother was from Trinidad. Anya has said that half of her relatives were killed in the war and that it was "... a genocide, a slaughter, a holocaust". Anya was born six years after her family left Nigeria in the wake of the war. Her parents separated following the war and her mother moved to the United States in the 1980s. Her book followed the experiences of four African-Americans as they learnt Portuguese and studied in a city with a majority Afro-Brazilian population. Anya found that the race of the students was critical to their experiences in Brazil as they felt less racially marked. Anya wrote that their "desires to develop new language practices, the varied resources and capital they seek to gain from fluency" and "most importantly, the participants multiple, shifting identities all contribute to their participation in different communities and lead to how successful they become or are perceived to be in learning Portuguese".
Racialized Identities in Second Language Learning won the 2019 AAAL First Book Award presented by the American Association for Applied Linguistics. The award "recognizes a scholar whose first book represents outstanding work in the field of applied linguistics".
Views on the death of Queen Elizabeth II
Following the death of Queen Elizabeth II, Anya tweeted "I heard the chief monarch of a thieving, raping genocidal empire is finally dying. May her pain be excruciating". Her tweet drew opprobrium from a number of commentators which Andrew Lawrence, writing in The Guardian described as a "... flood of condemnation, much of it laced with racism and misogyny".<ref nameGuard22/> Anya has described her parents as "colonial subjects" of the British Empire and said that "The broader impact of the British monarchy, you can look at that in my history...in addition to the direct, felt-in-the-skin impact of Queen Elizabeth's rule. So when I heard that the woman was dying, I rejoiced. Would you not if you heard that your oppressor was dying?". Anya has said that she is " ... recognized for being a loudmouth who's irreverent" and that "You don’t know how many times I've been called uppity and arrogant. And we all know what that means: 'nigger'". She has described herself as a "Black woman who's very vocally left-leaning, who speaks very openly on anti-racism, critical race theory and queer rights. Put it all together, and I’m definitely the juiciest target to rally internet hate".<ref nameGuard22/>

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