The Government of Belize has selected Guyanese national Dr. Cary Fraser to head the state controlled University of Belize. Dr. Fraser is the second Guyanese national to be appointed to a high post by the Belize government in the past week. Belize’s new Chief Justice Kenneth Benjamin is also a Guyanese national.

The Board of Trustees of the University of Belize announces the appointment of Dr. Cary F. Fraser as President of the University of Belize. Dr. Fraser’s appointment follows the recommendation of a search committee, and is effective Monday, 1st August.

Dr. Cary Fraser is a historian of International Relations who has written on U.S. foreign policy in the Caribbean, the history and politics of race in the United States of America, the Caribbean, and the international relations of the Middle East and Islam.

Fraser obtained his B.A. in History from the University of Guyana, the Diploma and M.Sc. in International Relations at the Institute of International Relations at the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, and his Ph.D. at the Graduate Institute of International Studies of the University of Geneva, Switzerland. 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.

Fraser has pursued a 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 O.A.S. 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).

Cary Fraser was born in Guyana in 1955. He is married to Pearl Fraser, and they have a daughter, Ayesha.

An official installation ceremony is scheduled for 24th August, 2011, at the University of Belize’s main campus in Belmopan, according to official press release issued by the University of Belize Board of Trustees.