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Graduate Students

Anderson Gonçalves

Global Studies

2023 - 2024

Noa Cykman

Sociology

2023 - 2024

Yuri Fraccaroli

Feminist Studies

2023 - 2024

Cedar Brown

Linguistic

2023 - 2024

Aline de Almeida

Spanish and Portuguese

2024 - 2025

André Sena

Sociology

2024

Sarah Brosio

Political Science

2024 - 2025

Hayate Murayama

History

2024 - 2025

Farah Hamouda

Sociology

2024 - 2025

Brittney Rose

Sociology

2024 - 2025

Alexis Wang

Economics

2024 - 2025

Susie Wu

East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies

2024 - 2025

Surojit Kayal

English

2023 - 2024

Travis Candieas

Education

2023 - 2025

Gehad Abaza

Anthropology

2023 - 2024

Russell Nylen

Anthropology

2023 - 2025

Orfalea Center Affiliated Faculty

Assistant Professor

Political Science

Associate Professor

Political Science

Professor

Anthropology

Assistant Professor

Sociology

Associate Professor

Feminist Studies

Associate Professor

English

Assistant Professor

Chicana/o Studies

Associate Professor

Black Studies

Professor

Anthropology

Assistant Professor

Global Studies

Assistant Professor

Global Studies

Professor

Sociology

Assistant Professor

Global Studies

Associate Professor

History

Associate Professor

Feminist Studies

Assistant Professor

Global Studies

Assistant Professor

Anthropology

Assistant Professor

Global Studies

Visiting Scholar

Orfalea Center

Distinguished Professor

East Asian Languages &
Cultural Studies

Assistant Professor

Chicana/o Studies

Assistant Professor

Global Studies

Undergraduate Students

Celia Naharro

Global Studies

2023-2024

Norah Brown

Global Studies

2023-2024

Milagros Araiza
Caballero

Global Studies

2023-2024

Emma Isabella Hirsch

Global Studies & Environmental Studies; Minor in Indigenous Studies.

2024-2025

Logan Russell Martin

Global Studies

2024-2025

Kimberly Nickel

Global Studies &
Sociology

2023-2024

Gary Tian

Environmental Studies

2023-2024

Isabella Genovese

Global Studies &
Environmental Studies

2023-2024

Hannah Linnea Miller-Vigil

Global Studies

2024-2025

Abigail Grace Rizqallah

Middle East Studies and Archaeology

2024-2025

Sara Ahmed

Global Studies
& Political Science

2023-2024

Sydira Shapiro

Communication
& Global Studies

2023-2024

Jayden S Chow

Global Studies

2024-2025

Sasha Lee Schotthoefer

Global Studies

2024-2025

Madeleine Wald

Global Studies

2023-2024

Bailey Dressner

Global Studies

2023-2024

Hannan Reimer

Global Studies &
Arabic Language Focus

2023-2024

Nicolette Van Der Poel

Environmental Studies
& Global Studies

2023-2024

Erika Hei Jiang

Global Studies

2024-2025

Avery Gunderson

Global Studies & Spanish

2023-2024

Orfalea Center Team

Paul Amar

Director

Paul Amar serves as a Professor in the Global Studies Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), and as director of the Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies. He is a political scientist and anthropologist with affiliate appointments in the Departments of Feminist Studies, Political Science, Sociology, Comparative Literature, and the Programs in Middle East Studies, and Latin American and Iberian Studies. A three-time Fulbright Fellowship winner who speaks six languages, Professor Amar served as founding director of the PhD program and subsequently as department chair in Global Studies at UCSB where he served as cofounder of the Area Global Institute (AGI) and of the Center for Feminist Futures. He also co-founded the Center for Middle East Studies at the Fluminense Federal University in Rio de Janeiro and the first Center for Global Studies in Brazil, at the State University of Rio de Janeiro. Before he began his academic career, he worked as a journalist in Cairo, a police reformer and sexuality rights activist in Rio de Janeiro, and a conflict-resolution and economic development specialist at the United Nations. His books include Cairo Cosmopolitan (with Diane Singerman, AU Cairo Press, 2006); New Racial Missions of Policing: International Perspectives on Evolving Law-Enforcement Politics (Routledge, 2010); Global South to the Rescue: Humanitarian Superpowers and Global Rescue Industries (Routledge, 2011); Dispatches from the Arab Spring: Understanding the New Middle East (with Vijay Prashad, Minnesota UP 2013); The Middle East and Brazil: Perspectives on the New Global South (Indiana UP, 2014); The Tropical Silk Road: The Future of China in South America (with Rofel, Viteri, Fernandez and Brancoli, Stanford UP, 2022); Cairo Securitized: Reconceiving Urban Justice and Social Resilience (AU Cairo Press, 2024); and Rio as Method: Collective Resistance for a New Generation (Duke UP, 2024). His book The Security Archipelago: Human-Security States, Sexuality Politics, and the End of Neoliberalism (Duke UP, 2013) was awarded the Charles Taylor Award for Best Book of the Year in 2014 by the Interpretive Methods Section of the American Political Science Association. In 2019, he was awarded Mentor of the Year by the Latin American Studies Program at UCSB.

Manaíra Athayde

Executive Director & Academic Coordinator

Manaíra Aires Athayde is the Executive Director and Academic Coordinator of the Orfalea Center for Global & International Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She holds a Ph.D. in Materialities of Literature – Literary and Media Studies from the University of Coimbra. Her dissertation received the 2018 Mário Quartin Graça Scientific Award for the Social Sciences and Humanities, granted by the House of Latin America, Portugal. She previously served as a Lecturer in the Latin American and Iberian Studies Program at UCSB, a Visiting Scholar at Stanford University, and a Visiting Professor at the University of Salamanca, Spain. She is also a member of the Brazilian Digital Literature Observatory at the Federal University of São Carlos, Brazil. She co-edited Digital Humanities in Latin America (Matlit Journal, 2023) and edited Literatura Explicativa: Ensaios sobre Ruy Belo (Assírio & Alvim, 2015). She was also part of the production team for the documentary Ruy Belo, Era uma Vez (RTP, 2014). Her research and teaching interests focus on digital humanities, literary and media studies, cultural studies, and archival research.

Omar Mansour

Public Education Academic Coordinator

Omar Mansour is the Public Education Academic Coordinator at the Orfalea Center for Global & International Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He obtained his Master’s in Global Studies from UC Santa Barbara. Omar organizes conferences and talks, conducts webinars and podcast interviews, and writes on issues of critical security in the Middle East and North Africa. Additionally, Omar instructs an undergraduate seminar in the Global Studies department at UCSB that helps students enrolled in study abroad programs create field research projects to do while in their countries of study. Finally, Omar is the Managing Editor of the global-e journal, hosted by the Orfalea Center.

Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky

Associate Director

Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky is a historian of global migration and forced displacement and Assistant Professor of Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is also Associate Director of the Orfalea Center for Global & International Studies and leads the campus-wide Initiative on Global Migration and Inequality. His research examines Muslim refugee migration and its role in shaping the modern world. He is the author of Empire of Refugees: North Caucasian Muslims and the Late Ottoman State (Stanford University Press, 2024). Dr. Hamed-Troyansky is currently working on a new book, which is a transnational history of Muslim displacement in the Middle East, Central Asia, and South Asia since 1850. His articles appeared in Past & Present, Comparative Studies in Society and History, International Journal of Middle East Studies, Slavic Review, and Kritika. He received his Ph.D. in History from Stanford University and served as a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University.

Nefeli Manoudaki

Graduate Student Researcher | IT Specialist

Nefeli Manoudaki is an architect-engineer and media artist whose practice explores the intersections of nature, sensory perception, and technology. She holds an MSc and is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in the Media Arts and Technology program at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her installations integrate artificial intelligence, immersive environments, and bio-inspired architectural forms across both digital and physical media. Projects such as Simulacra Naturae, Organoid_Protonoesis, and Hydnum merge biological data with generative systems to create multi-sensory environments that reimagine how humans experience the natural world. Nefeli’s work has been presented internationally at Ars Electronica, ISEA, ACM SIGGRAPH, and (upcoming) IEEE VISAP, among others. She is also an SBCAST-affiliated artist, contributing to the Santa Barbara creative community.
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