Rita Kiki Edozie is currently the Deval Patrick Endowed Chair of Political, Economic, and Social Innovation and Professor of Global Governance at the University of Massachusetts-Boston. She is the university’s former interim Dean of the John W McCormack School of Policy and Global Studies. Receiving her PhD in politics from New York City’s New School for Social Research in 1999, Kiki has been a teacher-scholar and an academic administrator of graduate education and undergraduate studies for over twenty years. Prior to UMass Boston, Kiki was a Professor of International Relations at Michigan State University’s James Madison College of Public and International Affairs and the Director of the African American and African Studies at the university’s College of Arts and Letters. She was a former 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 several academic books and scholarly articles on global development, democratization, African affairs, and race and identity. Some of Kiki’s recent books, The African Union’s Africa: New Pan-African Initiatives in Global Governance (2014) and Pan-Africa Rising: The Cultural Political Economy of Nigeria’s Afri-capitalism and South Africa’s Ubuntu Business (2017). Her recent book Africa’s New Global Politics: Regionalism in International Relations (with Moses Khisa, Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2022) received Choice Magazine’s 2022 rating as highly recommended reading.