Lloyd International Honors College

Dr. Omar H. Ali

Dean

AADS; History; Geography; IGS

[email protected]
(336) 334-5538
Website

Dr. Omar H. Ali is Dean of Lloyd International Honors College and Professor of Global African Diaspora History in the College of Arts & Sciences. He was named The Carnegie Foundation North Carolina Professor of the Year and appointed Knight in the Order of the Academic Palms (Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Palmes Académiques) by the French government for his work with teachers around the world. The author of over half a dozen books, he is a historian of the African Diaspora who explores the Atlantic, Mediterranean, and Indian Ocean worlds. Of East Indian and Peruvian descent, Dr. Ali is a graduate of the London School of Economics and Political Science and received his Ph.D. in History from Columbia University. He has been a Fulbright professor of history and anthropology at Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Bogotá, a visiting professor of African American and Diaspora Studies at Vanderbilt University, and a Library Scholar at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University. He has appeared on CNN, NPR, and PBS, among other media outlets. He gave a TEDx talk entitled “What’s in a Name?: Islam, History, and Identity.”

Among his responsibilities as dean are providing strategic vision, direction, and operational leadership to the university’s Honors College with approximately 1,000 students, overseeing the Global and Disciplinary Honors programs, the Undergraduate Research, Scholarship, and Creativity Office, serving over 14,000 undergraduate students, the Research Fellows program, and four Residential Colleges with over 500 students in living-learning communities. He does this with a professional and playful staff of nine, including two Assistant Deans, a Budget and Operations Manager, four Program Managers, a Faculty Director, and Assistant Director, in addition to both graduate and undergraduate assistants, Visiting Scholars, and over three dozen Honors faculty members at UNCG across the arts, humanities, natural sciences, social sciences, and those teaching in the pre-professional programs (law, medicine, and engineering).