University Center for International Studies Global Studies Center
University Center for International Studies Global Studies Center

Faculty Fellows

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Faculty Fellows

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.

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. 

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.
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.