University of Virginia

 

Vice Provost for International Affairs

 

We are pleased to announce that the University has appointed Gowher Rizvi, effective September 1, 2008. He is currently the Director of the Ash Institute for Democratic Governance and Innovation at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. In a career of more than twenty five years across four continents, Rizvi has combined academic appointments with positions in international organizations, not-for-profit institutions and the media.

 

Rizvi joined the Ford Foundation in 1995 as the Deputy Director for Governance and Civil Society with responsibilities for the Foundation’s work worldwide. He became the representative to New Delhi in 1998. The New Delhi office, with a grant-making budget in excess of $56 million in 2001, is the Foundation’s oldest and largest overseas office. Prior to joining the Ford Foundation, Rizvi was the Director of Contemporary Affairs at the Asia Society in New York, the leading public education organization dedicated to increasing American understanding of peoples and cultures throughout Asia.

 

He taught for nearly two decades at several British universities, including Oxford, theUniversity of Warwick, and St. Anthony’s College. He also served as the Asia-Pacific region head for the Oxford Analytica Daily Brief, an Oxford think tank. He is the founding editor of Contemporary South Asia, an academic and policy studies journal published at Oxford. Rizvi holds a B.A. Honors and M.A. from the University ofDhaka in Bangladesh and a D.Phil. from Trinity College, Oxford, where he studied as a Rhodes scholar.