Adaugo Pamela Nwakanma, PhD

About Pamela

Dr. Pamela Nwakanma is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Irvine. Her research and teaching focus on the political economy of gender and international development with expertise on the African context and the African diaspora.

Based on her award-winning doctoral research at Harvard University, her current book project focuses on the socio-economic forces that explain women’s economic mobility and paradoxical political stagnancy in Nigeria, Africa’s largest country. She also has adjacent projects that examine entrepreneurship, identity and political power in other parts of Africa and in the Americas.

She earned her Ph.D. from the Department of Government with a secondary field in the Department of African and African American Studies at Harvard University and was previously a Leading Edge Fellow at the American Council for Learned Societies. Bridging academia and development practice, she coordinated the research strategies for People Powered, the global hub for participatory democracy. She also completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Johns Hopkins University’s Stavros Niarchos Foundation Agora Institute for global democracy. At Harvard, she was a Graduate Research Associate of the Weatherheard Center for International Affairs and a Graduate Fellow of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Nwakanma has won several prizes and grants, including the Carrie Chapman Catt Prize for the study of women in politics and the National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant . 

Her work has been published in journals such as Perspectives on Politics and Politics, Groups, and Identities, as well as edited volumes such as the Palgrave Handbook of African Women’s Studies and Routledge’s African Scholars and Intellectuals in the North American Academy: Reflections of Exile and Migration. Her interdisciplinary research thus far has won multiple awards from the American Political Science Association, the Society for the Study of Social Problems, the African Studies Association, and the Lagos Studies Association. Her work has also been featured in public media outlets such as Black Perspectives, Break the Boxes, Collateral Benefits, and Voyages Africana.

Prior to her doctoral studies, Nwakanma taught at a middle school through an Urban Education Fellowship and worked as a Vice-HBO Translator in New York City. She received her B.A in International Studies-Economics with a secondary field in Linguistics from the University of California, San Diego in 2014.