Dr. Anju Reejhsinghani joined UC Santa Cruz in September 2022 as its inaugural Vice Chancellor for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion & Chief Diversity Officer. In that role, she leads strategic efforts to assess and enhance campus climates, strengthen inclusive practice, promote community engagement and belonging, and expand access to all.
Dr. Reejhsinghani previously served as the University of Wisconsin–Madison Assistant Vice Provost for Strategic Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Administration, where she oversaw units in employee disability resources, affirmative action planning, professional development, and climate research while directing strategic outreach, communications, and shared governance efforts.
As a globally minded educator and advocate for international education, she also served as Executive Director of the UW–Madison Institute for Regional and International Studies, a consortium of Title VI and other area studies centers. Before moving into administration, she was a tenured associate professor in history and international studies at the University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point (UWSP), a four-year regional comprehensive campus.
A widely trained scholar, Dr. Reejhsinghani’s academic and public humanities research intersects with Latin American, Latinx/e, African American, and Asian American studies and with race, gender, diaspora, and sport. At UWSP, she created an innovative speaker series that earned a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) public humanities grant. A specialist on modern Cuba and U.S.-Cuba relations, she developed some of the UW System’s first short-term credit-bearing study abroad programs to Cuba. Her research was recognized with a year-long fellowship at UW–Madison’s Institute for Research in the Humanities, and she served as a Project Scholar and Team Member for the University of Pittsburgh’s NEH Institute on Transnational Dialogues in Afro-Latin American and Afro-Latinx Studies. Her work has appeared in Muhammad Ali in Africana Cultural Memory, The World of Jim Crow: A Daily Life Encyclopedia, Dictionary of Caribbean and Afro-Latin American Biography, and Journal of American Ethnic History, among others. She has forthcoming chapters in two edited volumes, We Fight On: Educational Justice Work in the University of California after Proposition 209 and Afrolatinidades: Transnational Connections in Afro-Latinx and Afro-Latin American Studies.
Dr. Reejhsinghani earned a bachelor’s degree in history, summa cum laude, with a concentration in creative writing from Princeton University; a diploma in economics from the London School of Economics and Political Science; and a Master’s degree and Ph.D. in history from The University of Texas at Austin. She is a native of Western Massachusetts.
Email: vcdei@ucsc.edu