Name: Chiadikaobi Gregory Okafor
Year in program: Third
ABD Y/N: Spring 2025
Primary supervisor: Dr Walter Hawthorne
Major field: African History
Minor fields: Religion, African Diaspora
Link to your personal page or profile: https://hcommons.org/members/gregchiadi94
My proposed dissertation, Missionaries of the Faith: The Igbo and the Growth of the Catholic Church in Southeastern Nigeria, 1922-2022 aims to investigate how the Igbo people demonstrated active and conscious agency in facilitating conversion and the spread of the Catholic faith in Igboland. It hopes to explain why the faith continued to grow tremendously despite the exit of expatriate missionaries since the 1960s. From a diasporic lens, it examines the contemporary migratory trends of Igbo people as missionaries to places other than the metropole(s), thus, offering a new perspective to our understanding of the dynamics of local agency in mission fields and challenging dominant scholarship on the homogeneity of experiences between metropoles and mission fields.
Before coming to MSU, I obtained a BA in History and International Studies from Nnamdi Azikiwe University Awka and taught History at St. Johnbosco Seminary Isuaniocha and St. Michael’s Model Comprehensive School Nimo, Nigeria.