News Releases

Meeks appointed University Director, SALISES

For Release Upon Receipt - August 23, 2013

St. Augustine


ST. AUGUSTINE, Trinidad & Tobago – Professor E. Nigel Harris, Vice-Chancellor of The University of the West Indies (UWI), has announced the appointment of Professor Brian Meeks as University Director of the Sir Arthur Lewis Institute for Social and Economic Studies (SALISES) with effect from August 1, 2013. 

Brian Meeks is Professor of Social and Political Change and Director of SALISES at UWI, Mona. He has taught political theory, comparative politics, Caribbean political thought and African American politics at Michigan State University, Florida International University, Anton de Kom University in Suriname and UWI, Mona. Professor Meeks has held positions of Visiting Fellow at the Centre of Latin American Studies at Cambridge University, Visiting Tinker Scholar at Stanford University and Visiting Scholar, Brown University. He has authored or edited nine books and many articles on Caribbean politics and political theory. 

As Director of SALISES Mona, he chaired and helped organize the August 2012 conference ‘Fifty-Fifty: Critical Reflections in a Time of Uncertainty’ and the 28 national, regional and international events that commemorated 50 years of independence in Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago.  

Professor Meeks has been the Public Orator at UWI Mona since 2006. 

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About SALISES

The Sir Arthur Lewis Institute for Social and Economic Studies (SALISES) was formed in 2000 by a merger of the Consortium Graduate School and the Institute for Social and Economic Research (ISER).  ISER was established in 1948, in advance of the Faculty of Social Sciences, in order to build a solid foundation of empirical data on the Caribbean region and functioned admirably in this capacity for some fifty years. The Consortium Graduate School of the Social Sciences (CGSS) was a novel, 15-year initiative to train graduate students with an interdisciplinary perspective. The creation of SALISES merged the best research traditions of ISER with the high quality graduate teaching and supervision that was a hallmark of the CGSS. 

SALISES is represented at each of the campuses.  Each Unit is led by a Director who works in close collaboration with his/her counterpart.  The Unit at Cave Hill is led by Dr. Judy Whitehead; at Mona, Professor Brian Meeks and at St. Augustine, Professor Patrick Watson. The role of University Director rotates on a tri-annual basis.  Professor Watson is the immediate outgoing University Director.     

About THE UWI

Over the last six decades, The University of the West Indies (UWI) has evolved from a fledgling college in Jamaica with 33 students to a full-fledged University with over 40,000 students. Today, UWI is the largest and most longstanding higher education provider in the English-speaking Caribbean, with main campuses in Barbados, Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago, and Centres in Anguilla, Antigua & Barbuda, The Bahamas, Belize, Bermuda, British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands, Dominica, Grenada, Montserrat, St Christopher (St Kitts) & Nevis, St Lucia, and St Vincent & the Grenadines. UWI recently launched its Open Campus, a virtual campus with 45 physical site locations across the region, serving 16 countries in the English-speaking Caribbean. UWI is an international university with faculty and students from over 40 countries and collaborative links with over 60 universities around the world. Through its seven Faculties, UWI offers undergraduate and postgraduate degree options in Engineering, Humanities & Education, Law, Medical Sciences, Science & Technology, Food & Agriculture, and Social Sciences. 

(Please note that the proper name of the university is The University of the West Indies, inclusive of the “The”, hence The UWI.) 

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