Faculty

Quỳnh N. Phạm is an Assistant Professor in the International Studies Department. She received her PhD in Political Science at the University of Minnesota, with a double focus on international relations and political theory. Her research and teaching interests include global inequalities, forms of violence, decolonization, and the politics of imagining Asia. Her scholarship attends to conditions of domination as well as subaltern endurance and dissent in the contexts of colonialism, war, and...

Nora Fisher Onar is associate professor of international studies at the University of San Francisco and academic director of the graduate program in international studies. 

Her research interests include the theory and practice of international relations, social theory, foreign policy analysis, comparative area studies (Turkey/Middle East; Europe; Eurasia), political ideologies, gender, and history/memory. She received her doctorate from Oxford and holds master’s and undergraduate degrees...

Ilaria Giglioli is a scholar of migration, borders and racialization. A human geographer by training, she studies the creation, legitimization and contestation of borders, with a comparative focus in the Mediterranean and US southern border. In particular, she studies the social, political and economic processes that generate support for border fortification, as well as social movements that contest it. She also studies the relationship between border fortification, territorial inequality, and...

Roberto Gutiérrez Varea began his career in theater in his native Argentina. His research and creative work focuses on live performance as means of resistance and peacebuilding in the context of social conflict and state violence. Varea's stage work in the United States includes directing premieres of works by Migdalia Cruz, Ariel Dorfman, Cherríe Moraga, and José Rivera, among others. He is the founding artistic director of Soapstone Theatre Company, a collective of male ex-offenders and women...

Adrienne Johnson is a human geographer who earned a PhD from Clark University. Her dissertation looked at the political ecology and critical resource geographies of Ecuador’s palm oil industry with a specific focus on Afro-Ecuadorian, smallholder, and company participation in the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) certification scheme. She received an MA in geography and a BA in international development studies and political science from York University, Canada. Before joining the...

Professor Kidd graduated with a PhD from the School of Communications at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, with a specialization in international development. Her research agenda is broadly concerned with the role of grassroots communicators and movements in social change, and she worked as a popular communicator, trainer, and advocate in community radio, documentary film and video, and social justice communications.

Her research has been circulated in academic and non-academic...

Keally McBride is a professor of politics at the University of San Francisco and is interested in issues of power and social change. Her recent research has focused on the dynamics of information technology within contemporary capitalism, but she has published books on punishment and policing, movements of decolonization, and colonialism and the rule of law. She teaches a broad array of courses that investigate local public policy, European politics, political economy, peace and conflict, and...

Jennifer Murphy is an assistant professor in the international studies department at the University of San Francisco. Jenny’s facilitating, curriculum development, and research are informed by ongoing investigations in the interdisciplinary humanistic social sciences. Her geopolitical area of emphasis has been the territorial conflict between Western Sahara and Morocco (1975-present), particularly the political organizing and quest for self-determination of the indigenous Sahrawi people in the...

Jeffrey Paller specializes in African politics and sustainable urban development, and his research examines the practice of democracy and accountability in urban Africa. He has conducted fieldwork in Ghana, Kenya, Uganda, and South Africa. He recently published the book Democracy in Ghana: Everyday Politics in Urban Africa (Cambridge UP, 2019). His new project examines the contentious politics of African urbanization. He has received funding from the Social Science Research Council, National...

Sebastián Rubiano-Galvis is an Assistant Professor in the International Studies Department at the University of San Francisco, where he was formerly a Gerardo Marin Postdoctoral Fellow. 

His work studies the politics of environmental knowledge, technology, and data in Latin America. His current research includes projects on the history of gold mining in Latin America, the global governance of mercury, and the "datification" of environmental education, science, and policy. In the last decade...

Sadia Saeed is a historical sociologist with substantive interests in religion and politics, international human rights, and global inequalities. Her first book Politics of Desecularization: Law and the Minority Question in Pakistan (Cambridge University Press, 2017) examines the contentious relationship between Islam, nationalism, and rights of religious minorities in colonial India and Pakistan. It received the 2016-2017 Book Prize from the American Institute of Pakistan Studies (AIPS). Her...

Dr. Marco Tavanti is a sustainability and leadership international scholar whose experience stretches over 30 years and whose work has taken him to more than 18 countries in Europe, East Africa, Southeast Asia, and Latin America. Dr. Tavanti’s teaching in sustainable development, leadership ethics, intercultural diversity, and NGO management is grounded in Jesuit values and his scholarship is an embodiment of the University’s mission to be of service to humankind.

Dr. Tavanti is a systems...

John Zarobell is a professor of international studies at the University of San Francisco. Formerly, he held the positions of assistant curator at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and associate curator at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. His first book, Empire of Landscape, focuses on visual culture in colonial Algeria and was published in 2010. Art and the Global Economy, published in 2017, analyzes major changes in the art world as a result of globalization and facilitates a deeper...

Olivier Bercault specializes in Human Rights, armed conflicts, refugee issues and international criminal prosecutions. He served in the emergencies program at Human Rights Watch (HRW) and conducted research missions in numerous conflict areas: Eastern Chad, Darfur, Central African Republic, Algeria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Sri Lanka among others. During that period, he investigated and documented widespread and serious abuses committed by governmental forces, rebel and other armed groups. His...

Filip Kovacevic is an adjunct professor in the Departments of Politics and International Studies. As a Montenegrin author, social justice activist, and geopolitical analyst, Prof. Kovacevic has lectured and taught across Europe, the Balkans, the former USSR, and the U.S., including two years at Smolny College, the first liberal arts college in Russia, operating under the auspices of St. Petersburg State University. He received fellowships from the Open Society Institute and the National...