Associate Professor, English

Office: DH - 144
Phone: 410-772-4058
email: jokpala@howardcc.edu

Jude Chudi Okpala joined the full time English faculty in 1998.  He is the director of College Composition, and teaches World Literature in the Rouse scholars program. Okpala believes in Socratic tradition and accepts the necessity for students to engage Socratic commitment, that is, the use of reason and critical examination as a process of finding the truth and understanding their world.  Following this tradition, Okpala teaches with the purpose of celebrating the human spirit, especially by bringing students to active learning, by helping students understand that the rhetoric of humanity is communication and understanding, and by negating the idea that students come to class as tabula rasa—empty slate—waiting to be filled by the instructor.  

I help students give birth to their learning; I help students understand what is possible at their level of education; as such, I function as a Socratic midwife, facilitating students’ excellence and intellectual activity. Such a function requires exercises on critical thinking, and I urge my students to expect the exercises and to believe that they have the intellectual disposition to address them.

More important, my desire for excellence from students is founded on the reality of diversity and multi-modal literacies, on the philosophy that teaching is an extension of life: it is an extension of life because teaching, I believe, allows and enhances emergence of ethical behaviors which are necessary for negotiating our experiences in the society.  Accordingly, I do not take my vocation as a monologic process, or approach it with a premeditated methodology.  My approach assumes the “personality” of my students—that is, I recognize their learning techniques and fashion lesson modules on those techniques-- and with the aim of bringing them to active learning.  In so doing, I see my classroom as a learning community.  Put simply, my teaching is founded on these propositions: No student is a tabula rasa; students learn better when their preexisting knowledge is recognized and approved; a teacher is a “servant-leader” who has the discipline of a good listener and the sustaining spirit for cultivating learning.

Courses Taught:

• ENGL 115
• ENGL 121
• ENGL 122
• ENGL 207
• ENGL 225
• ENGL 203

Education and Certifications:

• Ph. D.  English, Howard University
• M.A.  Philosphy/English, Howard University
• B. A.  Philosophy, Bigard Memorial Seminary, Ikot Ekpene, Nigeria

Awards

• Summer Institute on Joseph Conrad,  Under Western Eyes, National Humanities Center, 2007
• The African Solidarity Council, Outstanding Speaker and Panelist Award, 2003
• Faculty Fellow, Preparing Future Faculty, Howard University, 1996-1988

Selected Publications           
Scholarly Papers

• "The Jacobs." New Essence: A Journal of Contemporary African American Philosophy 2 .1 (1991): 38-40.
• "Postcolonialism and Sarah Orne Jewett's Aesthetics: Plot and Imperial Motif in The Country of Pointed Firs."  Proceedings of Breaking Barriers - Literature & Emerging Issues International Conference, University of Maryland, Eastern Shore, October, 1997.
• “Deleuzean Deterritorialization, Black British Writers, and the Case of Ben Okri.”  Bma: Sonia Sanchez Journal 6 . 2 (Spring 2001): 97 -114. 
• "Igbo Metaphysics in Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart."  Callalo Achebe's Special Edition 25 . 2 (2002): 559-566.
• “Deleuzean Deterritorialization, Black Briton Writers, and the Case of Ben Okri.”  Black British Writing.  Ed. Lauri Mamsey and Victoria Arana.  London: Palgrave, 2004.
• Co-author: “Guidelines for the Preparation of English Faculty at Two-Year Colleges.” National Council of Teachers of English, 2005.
• “Postcolonial and Black British Aesthetics:  Kindred Spirits in Error.” Black British Aesthetics Today. Ed. R. Victoria Arana. Newcastle, Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007. 50-63.
• The Limitation of Postcolonial Aesthetics.”  Black British Aesthetics Conference, Howard University (click to view)
• Video Lecture on Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (click to view)

Fiction

• The Visible Man. Maryland: Allied Publishers, 1995.
•  The Uncircumcised.  Baltimore: Publish America, 2006