Rita “Kiki” Edozie was appointed the Senior Associate Dean and Chief Academic Officer(CAO) and Professor of Urban Studies at the CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies in August 2025 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, registrar, instructional technology, career counseling, and experiential learning.
Before assuming this role at CUNY-SLU, Dr. Edozie was a tenured full Professor of Global Governance at the University of Massachusetts-Boston, where she also 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, she 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 a tenured 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. Kiki has spent a career of teaching and research in global public policy focused on the collective actions and policy solutions developed by multi-level governance and collaborative networks —including governments, international organizations, civil society, and businesses—to address complex, transnational challenges focused on democracy and economic development.
At SLU, Kiki hopes to establish a program in global urban and labor studies that builds policy oriented, interdisciplinary, and global knowledge about cities and labor through innovative curriculum and research. The program will build on SLU’s urban and labor studies disciplines’ focus on the ways that multi-governance actors create local policies and labor impacts that go beyond national borders, impacting global public goods and the “global commons”. Because of its global content, Kiki hopes to collaborate with CUNY online to launch an online dimension of the initiative.
