Faculty

Lucia Cantero is an anthropologist concerned with the intersection of aesthetics, politics and identity. Her areas of research include Latin America and the Black Atlantic, political economy, visual culture, urban ethnography, transnationalism and globalization, media and cultural studies and critical theory. She is particularly drawn to issues of branding, advertising and markets as sites for the construction of political subjectivity and the ways this process inflects constructions of race,...

Nora Fisher Onar is assistant professor of international studies at the University of San Francisco. Her research interests include the theory and practice of international relations, foreign policy analysis, comparative area studies (Turkey; Middle East; Europe), political ideologies, gender, and history/memory. She received her doctorate from Oxford and holds master’s and undergraduate degrees from Johns Hopkins (SAIS) and Georgetown universities, respectively. She speaks five languages, has...

Lindsay Gifford is an Assistant Professor of International Studies and Anthropology, and she is currently the faculty adviser for the culture, societies and values track for the International Studies major. Prof. Gifford holds a PhD in Anthropology from Boston University, a BA in Anthropology from CSU Northridge, and is a graduate of Middlebury College’s Arabic Language School, as well as Damascus University’s Arabic language program in Syria. She was a Minority Postdoctoral Research Fellow for...

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...

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 publications...

Kathleen Klaus’ research focuses on political violence, land rights, forced migration, and elections, with a focus on sub-Saharan Africa. Her recent book, Political Violence in Kenya: Land, Elections, and Claim-Making, is published with Cambridge University Press. Klaus has conducted extensive research in Kenya, Ghana, Uganda, and Malawi and has received support for her research from the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, United States Institute of Peace, and others. Klaus teaches a range of...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Wei Yang Menkus received her PhD in East Asian Languages and Literature from Yale University. She teaches and researches broadly in Chinese cinema in a global context, with special interests in film genre, spatiality, transnational practice, and the intersection between China and Hollywood. She is currently completing a book manuscript on film space in contemporary Chinese cinema. Her teaching interests include Chinese cinemas, East Asian genre films, gender and visual culture, city literature...

John Zarobell is an associate professor and chair 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...

Dana Zartner is an Associate Professor in the International Studies Department at the University of San Francisco and is an Adjunct Professor at the School of Law. She received her BA in International Relations from Hamline University, her JD, with a concentration in international law from Boston University, and her Ph.D. in Political Science from UC Davis. Professor Zartner specializes in international and comparative law, with a focus on the intersection of environmental justice and human...

Stephen Zunes has been at USF since 1995, teaching courses on the politics of the Middle East and other regions, nonviolence, conflict resolution, U.S. foreign policy, and globalization. He served as the founder and first director of the Middle Eastern Studies Program. A prominent specialist on U.S. Middle East policy, Professor Zunes has presented hundreds of public lectures and conference papers in both the United States and over a dozen foreign countries. He has traveled frequently to the...