Omar Ali
Lloyd International Honors College, The University of North Carolina at Greensboro
Greensboro, North Carolina
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Website: http://omarhali.wp.uncg.edu
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Dean of Lloyd International Honors College and Professor of Comparative African Diaspora History at The University of North Carolina. Selected as The Carnegie Foundation North Carolina Professor of the Year, his latest book, Malik Ambar: Power and Slavery Across the Indian Ocean, was published by Oxford University Press. A graduate of the London School of Economics and Political Science, he received his Ph.D. in History from Columbia University and has been a Fulbright Professor of History and Anthropology at Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Bogotá, and a Library Scholar at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University. He also holds an appointment in the French Ministry of Education as Inspector of History and Geography for the International Baccalaureate and has served on the board of directors of IndependentVoting.org, the Cone Health Foundation, and the All Stars Project.
He has appeared on CNN, NPR, and PBS, among other news networks; his most recent TEDx talk is entitled “Race: A Function of Power.” At UNC Greensboro he regularly co-teaches a course entitled “How do we know what we know?: Power, Epistemology, and Methodology” with Professor of Chemistry Nadja Cech, on whose Medicinal Chemistry Collaborative he serves as a Research Associate. His interest in history, philosophy, and performance goes back many a moon; throughout the 1990s he performed on the Castillo Theatre stage and the streets of New York and now infuses play, performance, improvisation, history and practical philosophy into the Honors College and in his own classes–that is, in addition to offering workshops and open improv sessions to faculty, staff, and students. Locally, in Greensboro, he directs the community-based initiative Community Play!/All Stars Alliance–free cultural events, classes, and workshops in the city’s poor and working-class communities that support learning and development through performance and play.