Higher Education for Africa’s Resurgence in the 21st Century
Paul Tiyambe Zeleza
Vice President of Academic Affairs and Professor, History
Quinnipiac University
Time and Location
12:00pm, 206 Ingraham Hall, 1155 Observatory Drive, Madison, WI
Description
Paul Zeleza will share his recent publications and research work on the subject of higher education in Africa including his recently published book on Africa’s Resurgence: Domestic, Global, and Diaspora Transformations, a conceptual paper on African higher education for the Summit on African Higher Education to be held in Senegal this March and a book he is currently working on Transformations in Global Higher Education to be published early next year.
Bio
Dr. Paul Tiyambe Zeleza is the Vice President of Academic Affairs and Professor of History at Quinnipiac University, Hamden, Connecticut.
He came to Quinnipiac after serving as Dean of the Bellarmine College of Liberal Arts and President’s Professor of History and African American Studies at Loyola Marymount University. Prior to that he was head of the Department of African American Studies and the Liberal Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, taught at the Pennsylvania State University, and was Director of the Center for African Studies and Professor of History and African Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Before coming to the United States in 1995 he was College Principal and Professor of History and Development Studies at Trent University in Ontario, Canada. Previously he worked at universities in Malawi, Jamaica, and Kenya, and held the title of Honorary Professor at the University of Cape Town, South Africa.
He has worked as a consultant for the Ford and MacArthur foundations and as an adviser to the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development. 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 Fellows Program in 2013 that will sponsor up to 100 African born academics in the United States and Canada to work with African universities. He is a past president of the African Studies Association (2008-2009). He has raised millions of dollars in personal research projects and for institutional development. In July 2014 he was recognized by the Carnegie Corporation as one of 43 Great Immigrants in the United States. In May 2015 he will be awarded an honorary Doctor of Laws, honoris causa, at Dalhousie University for outstanding personal achievement.
Dr. Zeleza earned his B.A. with Distinction from the University of Malawi and an M.A from the University of London, where he studied African history and international relations. He holds his Ph.D. in economic history from Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada.
Dr. Zeleza’s academic work has crossed traditional boundaries, ranging from economic and intellectual history to human rights, gender studies, and diaspora studies. He 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 including Africa’s most prestigious book prize, the Noma Award, for his books A Modern Economic History of Africa (1993) and Manufacturing African Studies and Crises (1997). His most recent books include In Search of African Diasporas: Testimonies and Encounters (2012) and Africa’s Resurgence: Domestic, Global and Diaspora Transformations (forthcoming 2014). He has presented nearly 250 keynote addresses, papers, and public lectures at leading universities and international conferences in 31 countries and served on the editorial boards of more two dozen journals and book series and edited a personal online magazine, The Zeleza Post, from 2004-2012.