Uju Anya (born c.1976) is an academic of applied linguistics. She is associate professor of applied linguistics at Carnegie Mellon University
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.[1] 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.[2] Her parents separated following the war and her mother moved to the United States in the 1980s.[2] Anya moved to the United States in 1986.[1] She has two children, and a stepson from her marriage.[1] Anya identifies as a lesbian.[1]
She is an associate professor of applied linguistics at Carnegie Mellon University and had previously been part of the faculty of Penn State University.[2]
In 2019 Anya's book Racialized Identities in Second Language Learning: Speaking Blackness in Brazil was published by Routledge.[3] 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.[4] 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".[5] Anya's work drew upon Ron Darvin and Bonny Norton's concept of identities and investment in language learners from their 2015 paper on "Identity and a Model of Investment in Applied Linguistics".[5]
Racialized Identities in Second Language Learning won the 2019 AAAL First Book Award presented by the American Association for Applied Linguistics.[6] The award "recognizes a scholar whose first book represents outstanding work in the field of applied linguistics".[6]
Anya was one of the three editors of the 2020 book Racial Equity on College Campuses, published by the State University of New York Press alongside Liliana M. Garces and Royel M. Johnson.[7]