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 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 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 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 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.