Omar Hamid Ali (born February 10, 1971) is an American historian of the African diaspora who specializes in the history of independent black political movements in the United States, Islam in the Indian Ocean world, and black resistance to slavery in Latin America.
He is Professor of Comparative African Diaspora History and Dean of Lloyd International Honors College at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro.
He was a Fulbright professor of history and anthropology at Universidad Nacional de Colombia, a visiting professor in the Program for African American and Diaspora Studies at Vanderbilt University, and a Library Scholar at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University.
A graduate of the London School of Economics and Political Science, he studied anthropology at the School of Oriental and African Studies and conducted fieldwork in West Africa with anthropologist Maxwell Owusu before receiving his Ph.D. in history from Columbia University in 2003 under the direction of Eric Foner.
Ali is the author of four books, including Malik Ambar: Power and Slavery Across the Indian Ocean World (Oxford University Press, 2016) and In the Lion's Mouth: Black Populism in the New South (University Press of Mississippi, 2010), and wrote the narrative for The African Diaspora in the Indian Ocean World[1] exhibit for the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in collaboration with curator Sylviane Diouf.