Uzoamaka Nwachukwu is a doctoral candidate in History at Indiana University Bloomington, where she specializes in environmental history, African historiography, and digital humanities. Her academic training integrates archival research, oral history, and spatial analysis to examine how historical knowledge is produced through land, infrastructure, and everyday practice.
At the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, she is a predoctoral fellow in the Department Knowledge Systems and Collective Life. Her current project examines how abandoned mining landscapes in eastern Nigeria function as sites of Indigenous knowledge, collective memory, and environmental reasoning, treating nature and built environment as epistemic media through which extractive histories are interpreted and negotiated.
Her research has been published in Slavery & Abolition and edited volumes on African social and political history. She is the recipient of several fellowships and awards, including the Ruth Lilly Fellowship, SEEKCommons Fellowship, and an MPIWG Predoctoral Fellowship. In addition to her scholarly work, she co-founded Communities and Mining in Nigeria, a digital humanities platform that combines participatory mapping, oral history, and archival sources to document the afterlives of extraction and support community-centered historical research.
Projects
Landscapes of Memory: Indigenous Knowledge, Mining, and Placemaking in Eastern Nigeria