In August The Board of Trustees of the University of Belize announced the appointment of Dr Cary F. Fraser as President of the University of Belize.

Dr Cary Fraser is a historian of International Relations who has written extensively on American foreign policy in the Caribbean and the wider world, the history and politics of race in the United States, the Caribbean, and the broader Atlantic World, and the contemporary international relations of the Middle East and the politics of Islam. His work has been published in Canada, the Caribbean, the UK and the United States.

He obtained his BA in History from the University of Guyana, the Diploma and MSc.in International Relations at the Institute of International Relations at the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, and his PhD at the Graduate Institute. He has held fellowships from the Swiss Federal Government, Cornell University, the Social Science Research Council in New York, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation of Chicago, the University of Rochester, and has been a Visiting Fellow at the University of Maryland and Princeton University.

Dr Fraser has pursued a multi-faceted career as a high school teacher, a researcher on indigenous and other populations in the Mazaruni area of Guyana, and a project officer for the Caribbean Conference of Churches working in both Guyana and Suriname. He has also served as a Human Rights Observer for the Organization of American States in Haiti.

Dr Fraser comes to the University of Belize from the Pennsylvania State University where he taught in the Departments of African and African American Studies and History. He had also served as the Director of the Africana Research Center.

He is the author of Ambivalent Anti-Colonialism: the United States and the Genesis of West Indian Independence, 1940-64 (Greenwood, 1994).