Faculty

Associate Professor, received her Masters in Comparative Literature at San Francisco State University and her PhD from the Department of Spanish & Portuguese at Stanford University. Her areas of focus include Mexican, Border and Chicana/o Literary and Cultural Studies, with an interest in Feminist and Performance Studies.

Jorge A. Aquino, PhD, is an associate professor in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies, specializing in Latin American and U.S. Latinx Christian theologies and religious history, liberation theologies, race and religion, sexuality, and the theo-politics of social movements. He is involved in research, conference work, and publishing activities throughout the Américas (see his academia.edu profile).

Dr. Aquino is a principal researcher in the Theology, Ethics, and Politics Working...

Kathleen Coll is a cultural anthropologist whose research and teaching focuses on immigration politics and policies, cultural citizenship, and grassroots community organizing in the U.S., with special emphasis on the San Francisco Bay Area. Her books include Remaking Citizenship: Latina Immigrants and New American Politics (Stanford University Press, 2010) an ethnography of Mujeres Unidas y Activas and immigrant women’s activism in San Francisco, a co-authored book Disputing Citizenship (Policy...

Sergio De La Torre's project work has focused on issues regarding immigration, tourism, surveillance technologies, and transnational identities. These works have been exhibited in a variety of venues both national and international. He has received grants from the NEA, The Rockefeller Foundation, Creative Capital, the Potrero Nuevo Fund, and the Creative Work Fund, among others.

De La Torre's latest project is MAQUILAPOLIS (City of Factories), an hour-long video documentary made in...

Brian Dowd-Uribe is an associate professor in the international studies department at the University of San Francisco. His current research explores the social, agro-ecological, and economic dimensions of food, agriculture, and water policy, primarily in sub-Saharan Africa and Central America. Specifically Professor Dowd-Uribe’s research examines whether and to what extent transgenic crops benefit small farmers, the role of decentralized water governance committees in mitigating water-related...

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...

Elisabeth Jay Friedman was awarded her BA by Barnard College (1988) and her MA/PhD by Stanford University (1997). She is the author of Unfinished Transitions: Women and the Gendered Development of Democracy in Venezuela, 1936-1996 (Penn State Press, 2000), and the co-author of Sovereignty, Democracy, and Global Civil Society: State-Society Relations at UN World Conferences (SUNY Press, 2005). She has also published articles on transnational women's organizing, women's rights in Latin America...

Professor Pedro Lange Churión is both an academic and a visual artist. He has written and directed various films, including Crocodile (USA, 2000). Based on a short story by Felisberto Hernández. This film received a Remmy Bronze award for best dramatic adaptation at the Houston International Film Festival (2001). He also wrote and directed Visitas (Colombia, 2005), a full-feature narrative film that explores violence in Colombia. This film has garnered recognition as "Official Selection" in...

Lois Ann Lorentzen is Professor of Social Ethics in the Theology and Religious Studies Department at the University of San Francisco (USF) and Academic Director, Master in Migration Studies Professor Lorentzen received her PhD in Social Ethics at the University of Southern California. Prior to coming to USF she taught at Saint Joseph's University in Philadelphia.

Professor Lorentzen is the author of Etica Ambiental (Environmental Ethics) and Raising the Bar, editor of Hidden Lives and Human...

Julio Moreno is a professor of history and affiliated engineering faculty at the University of San Francisco. Born in the Salvadoran countryside, Professor Moreno fled his country's civil war at the age of fourteen and navigated the US educational system as an undocumented immigrant. He is the recipient of distinguished awards that include research fellowships on the globalization of U.S. business, technology, and diplomacy at the Library of Congress and the Institute for Historical Studies at...

Katrina Olds is Professor and Chair of History at the University of San Francisco, where she teaches undergraduates a broad range of topics in history and the humanities. Her first monograph, Forging the Past: Invented Histories in Counter-Reformation Spain (Yale, 2015) analyzed the intellectual, cultural, and political effects of a sixteenth-century Spanish Jesuit’s forged historical texts, and was recognized by the American Catholic Historical Association with its John Gilmary Shea Prize. Her...

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...

Cecília Santos received her PhD in Sociology from the University of California, Berkeley, and a Master in Law from the University of São Paulo. She joined the University of San Francisco in 2001, and since 2006 she is also a research member of the Center for Social Studies at the University of Coimbra in Portugal. She teaches courses on gender and development, globalization, sociology of law, and Brazilian culture and society.

Her research focuses on legal mobilization within and across...

Michael Edward Stanfield, PhD 1992, is an historian of modern Latin America, focusing on topics in the social and cultural history of various South American nations. A Spanish translation of his first book, Red Rubber, Bleeding Trees: Violence, Slavery and Empire in Northwest Amazonia, 1850-1933 (UNM Press, 1998), was published by Ediciones Abya-Yala, titled Caucho, conflicto, y cultura en la Amazonía Noroeste: Colombia, Ecuador, y Perú en el Putumayo, Caquetá, Napo, 1850-1933, in 2009. The...

Prof. Olmedo general area of expertise is Latin American Literary and Cultural Studies. Her research interests focus on Gothic Literature, Women and Gender Studies, and Emergent Horror Cinemas. She teaches courses in language and culture and also literature and film, such as: Feminist Theory and Feminist Discourse, The Revenge of the Monsters and Conflicts and Confluences in the Spanish speaking world. She is the curator of the Latin Horror Film Festival at USF.

Cecilia Titizano earned an MS in international and agricultural development from UC Davis and an MTS in theological studies from the Franciscan School of Theology. A native of Bolivia. Titizano holds a PhD in philosophical theology from Graduate Theological Union. Titizano is a constructive comparative theologian. She specializes in Indigenous thought and Christian theology with an emphasis on Trinitarian pneumatology and feminist and liberationist theologies. Her transdisciplinary research...

Susana Kaiser teaches at the Media Studies Department. She earned her PhD from the Institute of Latin American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, her MA from the Department of Communication at Hunter College of the City University of New York, and her BA in Advertising from the Jesuit University of El Salvador, in Buenos Aires, Argentina, her country of origin. Before coming to USF she was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research focuses on...