Will Guzmán

Will Guzmán is an assistant vice chancellor who provides leadership for the Offices of International Affairs and Community Engagement and Service. He has nearly thirty years of administrative experience in the public, private and non-profit sectors, including teaching Africana classes at Florida A&M University (FAMU) and Prairie View A&M University, among others.

Guzmán’s considerable civic commitment in the historic African American neighborhoods of Jackson Hill and Greenville led to his induction into Jersey City’s Mary McLeod Bethune Life Center “Trailblazing Pioneers Wall of Fame,” being granted Jersey City’s NAACP “Community Service Award,” and being given North Jersey’s National Action Network “Iron Sharpening Iron” Award. Additionally, for his extensive efforts in the Providence community, he was selected the City of Tallahassee’s “Neighbor of the Year.”

While serving as liaison to the Bahamas Minister of Education at FAMU’s Office of Black Diasporan Culture, Bahamian students became the largest campus group of international undergraduates. At the Florida Association for Volunteer Action in the Caribbean and the Americas, he recruited over 90 experts to provide technical assistance to numerous nations and dispersed grants to nongovernmental organizations in hurricane-afflicted countries. Fluent in Spanish, Guzmán has traveled to Africa, Central and South America, Europe and the Caribbean.

His research focuses on African American history after 1865 and Afro-Puerto Rican history after 1873. The inaugural Texas Tech University Press “Afro-Texans” series editor, he was awarded a National Humanities Center fellowship and the C. Calvin Smith book prize for “Civil Rights in the Texas Borderlands.” Guzmán is coediting Maceo C.Dailey’s “Emmett J. Scott: Power Broker of the Tuskegee Machine”; “Florida’s Black Power Movement”; and "'The Hill' We Climbed; 1876: Prairie View, The University on a Hill"; and writing the biography of legendary civil rights and criminal defense New Jersey counsellor ("Raymond A. Brown: Black Power’s Attorney"). A graduate of Passaic High, Will earned a Ph.D. in borderlands history from the University of Texas–El Paso.