Adaobi Muo

Adaobi Muo serves as a Lecturer at the Department of General Studies, National Institute for Nigerian Languages (NINLAN), Aba, Abia State, Nigeria, from August 2020 till present. She obtained her Ph.D. from the University of Lagos in 2016, specialising in Literature in English.

Between 2012 and 2020, she was an adjunct lecturer, at the English Departments the University of Lagos, Akoka and Lagos State University, Ojo, both in Lagos, as well as a facilitator, marker and course writer at the National Open University of Nigeria (NOUN).

Between 2018 to 2022, Muo participated in the EU sponsored research project, “Our Mythical Childhood: The Reception of Classical Antiquity in Children’s and Young Adult’s Culture in Response to Regional and Global Challenges,” as a researcher, translator and author. She covered the Igbo culture of the South East Nigeria.

Furthermore, from, 2021 to 2022, she served as a corporation partner, and played the role of an interviewer and translator, in the Lagos African Cluster Center (Lagos ACC) in UNILAG, for the research project, “Rethinking the “Informal” and Mainstreaming African Popular Arts and Entertainment,” funded by German Research Foundation. The publications in Igbo music and popular culture, on this research, are forthcoming. Adaobi Muo specializes in African and African Diaspora discourses, especially the impact of cultural plurality on contemporary black societies of the world. Her research interest also include Gender Studies, Comparative Literature and Religion.

Abstract for the LUCAS /LAHRI Fellowship project

A Cry for Help: Advocacy for Ecological Recuperation in Selected Nigerian Fictional Texts and Non-Fictional Locations.

The research aims to examine how ecological disasters are, first, visualised and recounted by fiction writers and, second, remedied by reprocessing activities of artisans and artists. To achieve this, it intends to employ contemporary imaginative works of male and female Nigerian environmentalist writers; Helon Habila’s Oil on Water (2010), Toochi Onyebuchi’s War Girls (2019), Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon (2014) and Niyi Osundare’s “Hole in the Sky” (2014), where causes and consequences of ecocide find heightened articulation.

In addition, it will observe economically and environmentally beneficial repurposing activities of trash-collectors, artisans and artists at six recycling locations in Aba and Onitsha. Analysis will be, primarily, regulated by Cajetan Iheka's 2021 concept of African Ecomedia that is concerned with ecological justice through indigenous African epistemologies. The research mainly argues that while storytellers concentrate on the environment, steering their tales to causes and consequences of global warming by demonstrating how the Nigerian earth groans under lethal anthropogenic activities, trash-collectors, artisans and artists in south-eastern Aba and Onitsha focus on the same environment but by reconnoitring dumpsites to recuperate and repurpose waste.

It will also identify correspondences and departures between theoretical suggestions of writers and practical applications of artisans, in the restorative attempts at saving the ecosystem, while negotiating sustainable existence. This is towards comprehending and detailing the causes, consequences and remedies of ecological degradation.