Faculty

Professor Anttila-Hughes received his PhD in Sustainable Development from Columbia University. His research focuses on understanding the social impacts of environmental processes, particularly those influenced by environmental degradation and climate change. Professor Anttila-Hughes' current research areas include: public health impacts of the climate; behavioral responses to new information about environmental risks; and determinants of the spread of environmental attitudes and ideas.

Professor Rachel Brahinsky teaches in the Urban and Public Affairs graduate program, the undergraduate Urban Studies program, and the Politics Department. She earned a PhD in geography from UC Berkeley, where she focused on the human and social geography of cities, with an emphasis on the politics of race and place. Her research and teaching center around the challenges of race and inequality in the context of rapidly changing American cities, with a longtime focus on the San Francisco Bay Area...

Kathleen Coll is a political 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 Bay Area. Her book Remaking Citizenship: Latina Immigrants and New American Politics (Stanford University Press, 2010) is an ethnography of San Francisco immigrant women’s experiences and activism in the context of hostile national immigration, welfare, and labor policies. Her...

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...

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...

Marco Jacquemet teaches courses in communication and culture, intercultural communication, geographies of communication, and justice and social change. His scholarship focuses on the communicative mutations produced by the circulation of migrants and media idioms in the Mediterranean area. His more recent book project is called Transidioma: Language and Power in the 21st Century. He is also present in Italian media activist networks, where he investigates the link between media and power.

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...

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...

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...

Noriko Milman received her BA in women's studies and sociology, and her MA and PhD in sociology, all from UCLA. She was a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst before joining the faculty at USF in 2012. She currently teaches several courses, including Introduction to Sociology, Research Methods, Sociology of Education, and Urban Education. Prior to pursuing a doctoral degree, Noriko was a first-grade teacher in an urban school, where she was named Educator of...

Megan Nicely is an artist/scholar whose teaching and research integrate theory and practice. Her scholarship brings together experimental choreography, critical dance and performance studies theory, philosophy, cultural studies, and physical practices including modern/contemporary dance, Japanese butoh, yoga, and other somatic approaches. Her group Megan Nicely/Dance has performed on both US coasts, in the UK, and in Europe, and her writing has appeared in TDR: The Drama Review, Performance...

Tanu Sankalia is a tenured full professor in the Department of Art + Architecture, and coordinates the Urban Studies Concentration within the Environmental Studies Program. He teaches courses in urban planning and design, architectural and urban history, and architectural design. He was trained in urban design at UC Berkeley, and in architecture at the School of Architecture, Ahmedabad, from where he graduated with a gold medal for the best diploma thesis. Professor Sankalia's research and...

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...

Ronald R. Sundstrom is a professor of philosophy and a member of USF’s African American Studies program, who also teaches for the university’s Honors College. He is the humanities adviser for the SF Urban Film Festival and a co-convener of the Black Philosophy Consortium. Professor Sundstrom is involved with academic organizations seeking to build bridges between academic philosophy and public policy, such as the Public Philosophy Network, the North American Society for Social Philosophy, and...

Professor James Lance Taylor is from Glen Cove, Long Island. He is author of the book Black Nationalism in the United States: From Malcolm X to Barack Obama, which earned 2012 "Outstanding Academic Title" - Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries. (Ranked top 2 percent of 25,000 books submitted and top 8 percent of 7,300 actually accepted for review by the American Library Association). Rated “Best of the Best.” The hardback version sold out in the U.S. and the paperback version was...

Prof. Urrutia-Jordana earned her BA in Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, and her MA and PhD in Spanish Literature at Stanford University (1996). She has taught at the University of San Francisco since 1996 and has been a recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship to the Universidad de Salamanca in Spain. Her first book, La poetización de la política en el Unamuno exiliado: De Fuerteventura a París Romancero del destierro, was published in 2003 by Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca...

Seth Wachtel is the program director of the Architecture & Community Design program. He received his MArch from UC Berkeley and has worked in architecture and construction in India, Colombia, Haiti, Israel, Mexico, Morocco, Nepal, Nicaragua, Puerto Rico, Zambia, and the San Francisco Bay Area. His focus is on culturally and environmentally appropriate design and the development of innovative construction techniques that produce regenerative and aesthetically fitting buildings and landscapes...

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...

James Zarsadiaz is Associate Professor of History and serves as Director of the Yuchengco Philippine Studies Program. His research and teaching interests include urban and suburban studies, California and the U.S. West, Asian American history, and the twentieth-century United States. He received a PhD and an MA in History from Northwestern University, and a BA in American Studies and Political Science from George Washington University. Prof. Zarsadiaz was a fellow at both the Smithsonian...