When Marquette University doctoral student Kingsley Chidimma Ezeuwa learned he had been selected as a recipient of the Cyril E. Smith Trust Family Fellowship, the honor marked more than an academic milestone. It affirmed years of intellectual curiosity shaped by a rural Nigerian childhood, rigorous historical training and a deepening commitment to reimagining African history through the lens of environmental change.
Ezeuwa, a third year Ph.D. student in the Department of History, studies empire and decolonization. His dissertation, tentatively titled “Destination River Niger: Environmental Romanticism and the Origins of British Fascination with West Africa, 1788 to 1900,” explores how the River Niger became both a physical lifeline in West Africa and an imaginative force in Europe. “My doctoral research is about the story of River Niger, the largest and principal water resource in West Africa,” Ezeuwa said.
Ezeuwa grew up in Ndiaguazu Amagu, a village in Ezza South Local Government Area of Ebonyi State, Nigeria, an Igbo cultural community where water shaped daily life. As a child, he joined friends playing around ponds and streams in search of fish, frogs and crabs. Those early encounters with local waterways would eventually inspire his fascination with one of Africa’s most storied rivers.
In his research, Ezeuwa examines how the Niger River supported the rise and fall of powerful Sudanese civilizations while also becoming, in the European imagination, a symbol of pristine wilderness. He argues that during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, British explorers, missionaries and imperialists carried with them a complex environmental consciousness shaped by the literary movement known as British Romanticism.
Poets such as William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Blake and John Keats emphasized emotion, individual experience and the beauty of nature in response to industrialization and Enlightenment rationalism. Ezeuwa’s work explores how this romantic reverence for nature shaped European perceptions of West Africa and laid ideological foundations for modern environmentalism, including conservation policies that continue to affect African communities today. “Treating the Niger as a historical force evokes the importance of environmental agency in African studies,” he said.
His research moves beyond familiar narratives of Atlantic commerce, abolition and colonization to probe the emotional and intellectual roots of Afro European relations. He also examines how romantic ecology and natural science intersected in the proliferation of national parks and protected areas, sometimes to the detriment of Indigenous populations.
Awarded by Marquette’s Graduate School, the competitive Smith Fellowship recognizes students who demonstrate mastery in their field, high academic achievement and readiness for rigorous research. For the 2025 to 2026 academic year, the fellowship has relieved Ezeuwa of graduate assistantship duties, allowing him more time to focus fully on research and writing. “The biggest privilege that the fellowship bestowed on me is freedom,” he said. “It has allowed me enough flexibility to sleep well, think more slowly and balance doctoral studies with family responsibilities.”
The funding also enabled him to travel to London in December 2025 to conduct archival research at The National Archives, the Royal Geographical Society library and the Natural History Museum. During the two-week trip, Ezeuwa gathered critical sources for his dissertation and completed two additional scholarly works slated for publication in 2026, further strengthening his academic profile.
Ezeuwa credits much of his growth to the mentorship of Dr. Chima J. Korieh, professor of African social and economic history and his dissertation director. The two first met in 2016 when Korieh visited the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, Nigeria’s first indigenous degree awarding institution, and taught Ezeuwa’s class. After reading one of his exam essays, Korieh encouraged him to pursue graduate study.
Since arriving at Marquette in 2021, Ezeuwa has also worked closely with committee members Dr. Peter Staudenmaier and Dr. Bryan C. Rindfleisch, whose scholarship has sharpened his thinking on environmental history and Atlantic connections. He expresses gratitude to the wider History faculty and department staff for nurturing his intellectual development within the Jesuit tradition of cura personalis, or care for the whole person.
Ezeuwa enthusiastically recommends the Smith Fellowship to other graduate students, noting that it demands both self-discipline and careful financial planning, noting the money is awarded at once and requires budgetary planning to stretch it throughout the duration of the fellowship.
Outside the archives and classroom, Ezeuwa stays connected to home through Nigerian films and comedy, often watching Nollywood productions set in rural communities. Summers in Milwaukee find him playing weekend soccer at Norris Park. He treasures quiet study hours in his bedroom and finds spiritual grounding at Calvary Presbyterian Church in Milwaukee.
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