Dr. Uju Anya is a scholar of language learning and Black experiences in multilingualism. She is an Associate Professor of Second Language Acquisition at Carnegie Mellon University, the 2023 Duolingo Research Fellow, and a 2023 Mellon Foundation New Directions Fellow. Her primary fields of inquiry are applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, world language education, multilingual education in the metaverse, and critical discourse studies examining race, gender, sexual, and social class identities in new language learning through the multilingual journeys of African American students. In this work, she introduced to applied linguistics a critical race pedagogy for more effective, antiracist, equity-minded, and inclusive world language teaching (CRPWLT), and she makes a call for Black Linguistic Reparations in U.S. language education in the Summer 2024 issue of Foreign Language Annals.

Dr. Anya’s research is published in journal articles and in her book, Racialized identities in second language learning: Speaking blackness in Brazil (Routledge 2017), winner of the 2019 American Association for Applied Linguistics First Book Award recognizing a scholar whose first book represents outstanding work that makes an exceptional contribution to the field. Her other main areas of inquiry include intercultural communication, applied linguistics as a practice of social justice, strategic translanguaging in world language pedagogy, and currently, Dr. Anya is building an online platform called AfroMetaverse where African American middle and high school students meet, chat, and collaborate with other Black teens in Colombia and Brazil playing multilingual educational games incorporating virtual reality experiences with the study of the history and cultures of Afrodescendants throughout the Americas.