Robert Elias

Robert Elias has taught in the Politics Department at USF since 1989. He founded the USF Legal Studies and the Peace & Justice Studies programs, and now coordinates the Legal Studies, Criminal Justice Studies, and the 4+3 Law programs. He teaches in the Honors Humanities and the BA/MA in International Studies programs. He's a Pre-Law Advisory Program member and advises the Student Pre-Law Society. Elias received the Sarlo Prize for teaching in 2006, the Frank L. Beach Award for Leadership in Service in 2001, and the USF Distinguished Research Award in 1996.

Elias has taught previously at Tufts University-Boston and France, the University of California-Berkeley, Penn State University, and the University of Maryland--College Park and Europe. He's been a researcher with the International Institute of Human Rights (Strasbourg), the Graduate Institute of International Studies (Geneva), Oxfam America (Boston), the Institute for Defense & Disarmament Studies (Cambridge), and the Vera Institute of Justice (New York).

Elias is from a Czech and Irish-Catholic working class family in New York City, and was educated at the University of Pennsylvania (B.A.), Penn State University (M.A./PhD), and the University of Strasbourg (Certificate). He is the author of Victims of the System (Transaction Books), The Politics of Victimization (Oxford University Press), and Victims Still (Sage). He is the editor of Baseball and the American Dream (M.E. Sharpe) and coeditor of Rethinking Peace (Lynne Rienner Pub.) and of The Peace Resource Book (Ballinger). He's published articles on crime, victimization, human rights, alternative development, and political movements. Elias is the Editor of Peace Review, and Associate Editor of New Political Science, the Encyclopedia of Peace, Violence & Conflict, and the International Review of Victimology. He has published a mystery novel, The Deadly Tools of Ignorance (Rounder Books). His latest non-fiction book is The Empire Strikes Out: How Baseball Sold U.S. Foreign Policy & Promoted the American Way Abroad (The New Press).