Dr. Paul Tiyambe Zeleza

Speaker bio:

Paul Tiyambe Zeleza, has been at a dozen universities in six countries on three continents and the Caribbean region. He held distinguished academic and senior administrative positions in Canada and the United States for 25 years before taking the position of Vice Chancellor and Professor of the Humanities and Social Sciences at the United States International University-Africa in January 2016.

In the early 2000s Professor Zeleza worked as a consultant for the Ford and MacArthur foundations on their initiatives to revitalize higher education in Africa. His research project on the African academic diaspora conducted for the Carnegie Corporation of New York in 2011-12 led to the establishment of the Carnegie African Diaspora Fellowship Program in 2013 that has to date sponsored nearly 400 African born academics in the United States and Canada to work with dozens of universities in six African countries. He was President of the US African Studies Association in 2008-2009.

Professor Zeleza has published more than 300 journal articles, book chapters, reviews, short stories and online essays and authored or edited 27 books, several of which have won international awards. He has presented nearly 250 keynote addresses, papers, and public lectures at leading universities and international conferences in 32 countries and served on the editorial boards of more than two dozen journals and book series. He currently serves as Editor-in-Chief of the Oxford Bibliographies Online in African Studies.

Professor Zeleza has received numerous international awards from major universities. In July 2013, he was recognized in The New York Times as one of 43 Great Immigrants in the United States. In May 2015 he was awarded an honorary Doctor of Laws, honoris causa, at Dalhousie University for outstanding personal achievement. In 2015 he was a fellow at Harvard University and has held the positions of Honorary Professor at the University of Cape Town since 2006 and at Nelson Mandela University since 2019.

Professor Zeleza is currently a member of the Administrative Board of the International Association of Universities, the Advisory Board of the Alliance for African Partnership, as well as Chair of the Advisory Council of the Carnegie African Diaspora Fellowship Program, Chair of the Board of Trustees of the Kenya Education Network, and is a member of the University of Ghana Council.