Faculty Fellows

FACULTY FELLOWS

Each year, the Global Studies Center selects one outstanding University of Pittsburgh faculty member whose scholarship supports the Center’s research, curricular, and outreach priorities as its Faculty Fellow. This award is designed to advance and showcase faculty research related to GSC’s themes.

Research Initiatives:

Critical World Ecologies
Migrations
Global Health
Contested Cities

The GSC Faculty Fellow will deliver one public lecture in the course of the award year (August 2025 through June 2026). In addition, the Fellow will participate in several (3-4) major Center events pertaining to her or his research throughout the year (to be arranged in consultation with the Director). The Fellowship will support:

Research and projects related to one or more GSC themes;
Domestic and international travel;
Development of a new or significantly enhanced course with substantial coverage of one or more GSC themes.

Caitlin Bruce

Dr. Caitlin Bruce, Assistant Professor of Communications at the University of Pittsburgh, is one of two 2025 Faculty Fellows. Her fellowship project, Aesthetics of Solidarity: The Intermedia Politics of Transnational Movement, investigates how street art, murals, and other public visual media foster cross-border solidarity and serve as vehicles for civic dialogue in global social movements. Focusing on case studies in Mexico, France, and Argentina, Dr. Bruce’s work traces how visual culture intersects with migration, memory, and protest. Through public programming, student engagement, and research collaboration, her fellowship will enrich conversations on transnational activism and the aesthetics of global justice.

Osea Giuntella

Dr. Osea Giuntella, the second Global Studies Faculty Fellow for AY 2025 - 2026, is leading an ambitious project that examines the global health impacts of automation and artificial intelligence on workers. His interdisciplinary research compares how AI adoption affects mental and physical health, occupational safety, and labor conditions in the U.S., Germany, and China. A recognized scholar with over 40 peer-reviewed publications and deep expertise in economics, health, and technology, Dr. Giuntella will organize a major workshop titled Automation, AI, and Global Health: Impacts on Worker Well-Being and Care Delivery" in March 2026. The workshop will bring together international experts to explore the dual role of AI in transforming both healthcare delivery and worker well-being. As part of his fellowship, Dr. Giuntella will also develop a new course, Automation, AI, and Health, offering students the tools to critically analyze the intersection of technology, health systems, and social justice—further strengthening the Global Studies Center’s mission to address pressing global challenges.

Past Faculty Fellows

Shalini Puri

Dr. Shalini Puri, Professor of English and recipient of the Chancellor’s Distinguished Teaching Award, works on postcolonial and cultural studies of the global south with a focus on the Caribbean. Her research spans memory studies, environmental humanities, feminism, marxism, nationalism, indentureship and slavery, fieldwork, the arts, and everyday cultural practices. Puri is also a co-founder of the Pitt Prison Education Project. Her current project, “Writing on Water: Postcards from the Caribbean Anthropocene,” explores the representations and silences of the Caribbean water crisis. It tries to shift discourses of human rights and the Anthropocene by drawing on the sensory and embodied approaches of the arts.

Mari Webel

Mari Webel is an Associate Professor in the Department of History, specializing in modern Africa and the history of health. She received her Ph.D in 2012 from Columbia University, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship in global health and African Studies at Emory University. Webel joined the Pitt faculty in 2014. Her book The Politics of Disease Control: Sleeping Sickness in Eastern Africa, 1890-1920, will be released this month in the New African Histories series of Ohio University Press. The Politics of Disease Control is a history of African politics and colonial public health, focusing on sleeping sickness at Lake Victoria and Lake Tanganyika. Her current project, The Neglected Tropical Diseases in Global Health’s History and Present examines the emergence of the “NTDs” as an operative and imaginative category in public health since the 1970s. She was awarded the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s New Directions Fellowship in 2019 to pursue training in epidemiology and parasitology for her ongoing work on the history of the NTDs.

Michael Glass

Dr. Michael Glass is an urbanist who works at the intersection of geography and planning. His primary research is on city-region governance and planning, housing, and urban infrastructure; he has regional expertise in Southeast Asia, North America, and Australasia. He is the co-editor of Performativity, Politics, and the Production of Social Space (Routledge, 2014) and co-author of Priced Out: Stuyvesant Town and the Loss of Middle-Class Neighborhoods (NYU Press, 2016). His most recent research examines the ways that infrastructure shapes regions and influences regional equity. He has published extensively in leading international journals and is on the editorial boards of Asian Geography Journal and Regional Studies, Regional Science. Winner of the 2015 Bellet Award for Teaching Excellence, Dr. Glass is the Director of the Urban Studies Program and serves as the undergraduate advisor.

Müge Kökten Finkel

Dr. Müge Kökten Finkel is Assistant Professor of International Development and Program Director of the Master of International Development Program at the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs (GSPIA) at the University of Pittsburgh. Prior to her academic appointment in GSPIA, she worked as a Social Development Specialist at the World Bank for the Middle East and North Africa region, and consulted for the International Food Policy Research Institute. She worked on youth and gender-focused projects in Yemen, Egypt, and Morocco. Dr. Finkel is the faculty co-lead of the Ford Institute for Human Security working group on Gender Equality in Public Administration (GEPA), a collaborative research effort with UNDP. Her current research focuses on politics of public sector employment and opportunities for women.

Shanti Gamper-Rabindran

Shanti Gamper-Rabindran, a professor at GSPIA, with joint appointments in the Department of Economics and the School of Law, is Global Studies Faculty Awardee for AY 2023-2024. She will convene a workshop on the Just Energy Transition, bringing together scholars and policy advisors in the United States, Canada and India. The Just Transition envisions workers and communities shifting away from reliance on fossil fuel extractive economies to securing quality livelihoods in the greener, regenerative economy. The workshop will build on Gamper-Rabindran Just Transition research in the United States and India, funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, her collaborations in Canada, her book America’s Energy Gamble (Cambridge UP 2022) and her edited volume The Shale Dilemma: A Global Perspective (University of Pittsburgh Press 2018). Gamper-Rabindran, in collaboration with Global Studies, the various area studies centers and the Mascaro Center, had convened three earlier international workshops at Pitt in the nexus of economic development, energy and environment.