Dr. Raphael Njoku

Professor, Department of History

Dr. Raphael Chijioke Njoku, Department of History, teaches history and global studies courses at Idaho State University. His research specialty is African history and culture, especially decolonization, intellectual history, nationalism, war and peace, and African Diaspora. He is the author of Queen Elizabeth and the Africans: Narrating Decolonization and African Development, 1947 to 2022 (Leuven University Press, 2024), West African Masking Traditions and African Diaspora Masquerade Carnivals (Rochester University Press, 2020) and United States and Africa Relations: 1400s to Present (Yale University Press, 2020). Njoku has published 12 books (comprising 49 peer-reviewed essays), 44 peer-reviewed articles in academic journals and edited volumes, 29 short essays, 17 book reviews, and 87 academic presentations. His West African Masquerade book, accessed 36,120 times in 190 territories, was nominated for the Katherine Briggs Book Prize in 2021. It has been considered for the prestigious 2025 ACLS Open Access Book Prize and Arcadia Open Access Publishing Award. Njoku, who was inducted into the “Nigeria Academy of Letters” (NAL) in 2023, is on a Canadian Government-funded CAD$2.5 million “Participedia Democracy Research Team." His current research under the “Democratic Representation Cluster" focuses on the history of democratic collapses in Nigeria. When completed, it will shed more light on the dynamics of democratic relapses in this most populous African country.