Rita “Kiki” Edozie is the Associate Dean and Chief Academic Officer (CAO)at the CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies where she heads the academic and student services division of the school. As CUNY-SLU’s CAO, Dr. Edozie oversees a wide range of areas including the labor and urban studies departments, faculty affairs and development, curriculum innovation, enrollment management and admissions, student services and success, library services, instructional technology, and career counseling and experiential learning.
Before assuming this role at CUNY-SLU, Dr. Edozie was Professor of Global Governance at the University of Massachusetts-Boston, where she served as the interim Dean and Associate Dean of the John W. McCormack School of Policy and Global Studies (2017–2023) until the school was recently merged into the College of Liberal Arts (CLA). Having received her graduate education from CUNY’s Brooklyn College and her PhD in Political Science from the New School for Social Research in the 1990s, Kiki has been a teacher-scholar and an academic administrator of graduate and undergraduate education for over twenty-five years. Prior to UMass Boston, she was Professor of International Relations at Michigan State University’s James Madison College of Public Affairs and the Director of African American and African Studies at the university’s College of Arts and Letters (CAL). She also served as the Deputy Director of the Institute of African Studies at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA).
Kiki is an accomplished scholar and author of eight books and numerous scholarly articles on issues in global development, comparative democratization, African affairs, urban studies and policy, and race and identity.
