African American & African Diaspora Studies

Omar H. Ali, Professor of AADS and Dean of Lloyd International Honors College, is a historian of the global African diaspora who explores how Africans and people of African descent have shaped the Atlantic, Mediterranean, and Indian Ocean worlds since antiquity. Named the Carnegie Foundation North Carolina Professor of the Year in 2016 and Knight in the Order of Academic Palms by the French government in 2021, 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 Lecturer at Columbia University, a Fulbright Professor of History and Anthropology at Universidad Nacional de Colombia, a Visiting Professor at Vanderbilt University, and a Library Scholar at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University. Ali founded and co-directs the Ethiopian, East African, and Indian Ocean Research Network, the Islamic Studies Research Network, and the Afro-Latin American/Latinx Studies Project. He has published seven books and established the Lenora Fulani Archive at the Walter Clinton Jackson Library. The collection includes a range of documents (including notes, papers, articles, newsletters, flyers, and memorandums) as well as photographs of the pioneering independent political leader and educator Dr. Lenora B. Fulani. In 1988, Fulani became the first woman and the first African American in the nation’s history to get on the ballot in all fifty states running for U.S. President. Most recently, Dr. Ali served as a subject matter expert to write a history of African Americans in North Carolina for the City of  High Point’s Commission on Reparations. See report. His latest book project is entitled Africans in the Ancient Mediterranean World, being co-authored with the classical philologist Dr. Rebecca Muich at St. Louis University.