Dr. Omar Ali

Dean Emeritus & Rosenthal Excellence Professor

History & AADS

ohali@uncg.edu
(336) 334-5538 

Dr. Ali served as Dean of Lloyd International Honors College from 2015 to 2025, infusing performance, play, and improvisation into the curriculum and culture of the Honors College to support student learning and development. As Dean he provided strategic vision, direction, and operational leadership to the Honors College, overseeing the work of the Global and Disciplinary Honors programs, the Undergraduate Research, Scholarship, and Creativity Office, the Residential Colleges, and helped in the transition of the Global Engagement Office into LIHC. During his tenure, he also helped to grow the Honors College endowment, increased the number of scholarships, and created partnerships with the National Humanities Center, the TEDx organization, Community Play!/All Stars Alliance, the International Civil Rights Center and Museum, the Smithsonian Institution, and with the East Side Institute, he helped to launch “Let’s Learn!: The World as Classroom.”

A historian of the global African Diaspora who has authored or edited nine books, he explores the political, legal, and scientific contributions of Africans and people of African descent in the making of the Atlantic, Mediterranean, and Indian Ocean worlds. Dr. Ali graduated from the London School of Economics and Political Science and received his Ph.D. in History from Columbia University. In 2016 he was named The Carnegie Foundation North Carolina Professor of the Year, and in 2021 he was appointed Chevalier dans L’Ordre des Palmes Académiques by the French Ministry of Education for his work with teachers around the world.

Of East Indian and Peruvian descent, Dr. Ali began his career at the United Nations in New York, working as an international civil servant at the Dag Hammarskjöld Library while volunteering as a grassroots community organizer. A longtime supporter of non-partisan electoral reform and inner-city youth development, he was first introduced to the power of performance, play, and improvisation in creating developmental learning environments as a member of the Castillo Cultural Center artist collective. He performed on the streets of New York City with the All Stars Project and on various stages–including in Martinique, in Aimé Césaire’s A Season in the Congo/Un Saison au Congo.

He is the Elizabeth Rosenthal Excellence Professor of History and African American and African Diaspora Studies at UNC Greensboro and is a Research Associate in the Medicinal Chemistry Collaborative in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the university. He has also taught in the Departments of History at St. John’s University and Fordham University, at the Institute for Research in African-American Studies at Columbia University, and has served as an Assistant Professor of History at Towson University, a Fulbright visiting professor of History and Anthropology at Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Bogotá, a visiting professor in the Department 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.

Dr. Ali has given public talks, conference papers, and lectures across the United States as well as in Ethiopia, France, Tanzania, Ghana, India, Sri Lanka, Colombia, and England. He has appeared as a commentator on CNN, NPR, PBS, CBC, and Al Jazeera, as well as in U.S. News & World Report, Time, Raleigh News & Observer, and National Geographic. His efforts to translate scholarship to wider audiences has taken the form of TEDx talks, including “What’s in a Name?: Islam, History, and Identity,” the New York City Department of Education’s project Hidden Voices: Stories of the Global African Diaspora, and the digital exhibit “The African Diaspora in the Indian Ocean” through the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, which was adopted by UNESCO.