Michael Echeruo

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Michael Joseph Chukwudalu Echeruo (born March 14, 1937) is a Nigerian academic, professor and literary critic from Okigwe, Imo State. He was educated at the University College, Ibadan (now the University of Ibadan) from 1955 to 1960 and was contemporaries with a few notable writers and poets from the college, such as Christopher Okigbo. He earned his Masters and Ph D degrees from Cornell University, Ithaca, NY in 1963 and 1965 respectively. One of the most versatiule of African critics, he has published in English Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama, in the modern English novel. Echeruo was primarily notable as a critic of western writers on Africa, as he viewed himself and his contemporaries as writers fighting for an African viewpoint instead of a western viewpoint on the contintent. He is best known in poetry for his collection of poems, Mortality (1968); in cultural history for his pioneering study of Victorian Lagos and in lexicography for his Dictionary of the Igbo Language (Yale 1998). He is currently William Safire Professor of Modern Letters in the English Department of Syracuse University, a university in Syracuse, New York, United States. He serves currently as a member of the Modern Language Association of America (MLA) Committee of the New variourum Shakespeare.