Dr. Paul Tiyambe Zeleza has been announced as the new Vice Chancellor of the United States International University-Africa (USIU-A) with effect from 1 January, 2016. The current Vice Chancellor Prof. Freida Brown, who has been with the university for the last 21 years, is set to retire.
Dr. Zeleza, a Malawian national, is the Vice President of Academic Affairs and Professor of History at Quinnipiac University, Hamden, Connecticut. He joined Quinnipiac after serving as Dean of the Bellarmine College of Liberal Arts as well as Professor of History and African American Studies at Loyola Marymount University. Prior to that Dr. Zeleza was Head of the Department of African American Studies and the Liberal Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor at the University of Illinois, Chicago. He also taught at the Pennsylvania State University, and was Director of the Centre for African Studies and Professor of History and African Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Zeleza has lived in to Kenya before and he did his PhD dissertation in Kenyatta Univeristy between 1979–1980. He returned to Kenyatta in 1984 to teach African economic history and it was there that he began his extensive research on his award winning book, A Modern Economic History of Africa. He has gone on to publish over 300 journal articles, book chapters, reviews, short stories and online essays and authored 27 books. He also blogged at zeleza.com (Zeleza Post) from 2004-2012.
USIU has close to 6,000 students representing 69 nationalities, 15 percent of whom are international.