Dr Mary Ononokpono

Mary Ononokpono is an historian of Africa and an award-winning writer. Her work maps the lives of continental and diasporic African peoples through the reclamation of historical, contemporary and futuristic narratives. Mary’s scholarly interests sit at the intersection of economic, social, cultural, intellectual and political history. Central to her work is the premise that present day conditions impacting peoples of African descent can best be understood through robust examination of causalities, continuities and changes in the deeper African past. Through interrogation of the deeper past, Mary aims to provide a canvas upon which solutions to contemporary and future conditions can be crafted. 

Mary’s JRF research project begins the work of connecting pre-colonial Nigerian histories to histories of Anglo-Africans. The project will examine the ways in which Biafran peoples exploited the economic and educational opportunities that presented in the long nineteenth century through the prism of migration. The aim is to discover the degree to which West African migrations of the long nineteenth century led to complex economic, educational and health disparities within continental and satellite African communities in the present day. The work is of interest to scholars located in a variety of disciplines, but equally, to policy makers embroiled in contentious global immigration debates.  

Mary’s PhD Thesis, entitled, The Economic Lives of the Women of the Biafran Littoral, 1650-1850, which she completed at the University of Cambridge Faculty of History, examines the role of elite and enslaved Biafran women in the development of the Trans-Atlantic Biafran economy. It is primarily concerned with the impact Atlanticisation had on the autonomy of these women as slave and consumer markets expanded and the economy transitioned from one based on slave exports to one based on agricultural produce or ‘legitimate’ commerce.  

Mary holds an MPhil in African Studies also from the University of Cambridge where she graduated top of her cohort with distinction. Her dissertation, Temporal Transitions and the African Imagination: Archiving Social Death (2018), is an interdisciplinary analysis of the ways in which the African imaginative archive makes sense of mnemonic and historical ruptures wrought by the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. 

Before making the switch to research and writing, Mary worked as a creative professional in the fashion and visual arts sectors. Storytelling, be that textual or visual, is thus integral to her ethos and her work as an historian is heavily influenced by material and visual cultures. Mary is passionate about wider public engagement and sees her creative work, which is closely linked to her academic work, as the perfect tool for building on pre-existing engagement. Mary is a 2021 Edinburgh TV Festival TV PhD alumna. Her prize-winning fiction has been published in a variety of anthologies and magazines and, in addition to her doctoral thesis, Mary has been completing a novel and a short story collection.