Omar H Ali

Life

Ali is of East Indian and Peruvian background. He is Professor of Comparative African Diaspora History and Dean of Lloyd International Honors College at The University of North Carolina, Greensboro. He is on the faculty of the African American & African Diaspora Studies Program, History Department, and International & Global Studies at UNCG. He has also been a Fulbright professor of history and anthropology at Universidad Nacional de Colombia, a visiting professor in the Program for African American and Diaspora Studies at Vanderbilt University, and a Library Scholar at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University. A graduate of the London School of Economics and Political Science, he studied anthropology at the School of Oriental and African Studies and conducted fieldwork in West Africa with anthropologist Maxwell Owusu before receiving his Ph.D. in history from Columbia University in 2003 under the direction of Eric Foner. Ali is the author of four books, including Malik Ambar: Power and Slavery Across the Indian Ocean World (Oxford University Press, 2016) and In the Lion's Mouth: Black Populism in the New South (University Press of Mississippi, 2010), and wrote the narrative for The African Diaspora in the Indian Ocean World exhibit for the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in collaboration with curator Sylviane Diouf. Selected as the 2016 Carnegie Foundation North Carolina Professor of the Year, he serves as a Road Scholar for the North Carolina Humanities Council and History and Geography Deputy Inspector for the French Ministry of Education; he has also served on the History Academic Advisory Committee of the College Board and the Teaching Prize Committee for the World History Association. He is member of the board of directors of the All Stars Project, IndependentVoting.org, and the Cone Health Foundation. His media appearances include CNN, NPR, Al Jazeera, Telemundo, C-SPAN, and PBS, among other networks.