Faculty Fellows

Each year, the GSC selects as its Faculty Fellow one outstanding University of Pittsburgh colleague whose scholarship advances the Center's mission. Michele Reid-Vazquez is Associate Professor in the Department of Africana Studies and a specialist in African Diaspora in the Caribbean, Latin America, and the Atlantic World, and Afro-Latinx History in the U.S. As the 2020-2021 GSC Faculty Fellow, Dr. Reid-Vazquez will convene an interdisciplinary conference entitled, "Transnational Dialogues in Afrolatinidad" and create a new undergraduate course that will feature a student research poster exhibit. The goal of the project is to expand transnational, transregional, and interdisciplinary research, education, and programming in the global arenas of Afro-Latin American Afro-Latinx studies. The intersections of race, ethnicity, and migration continue to shape contemporary societies through the complex confluence of blackness and identity in the Americas. These endeavors will facilitate scholarly knowledge and expand our understanding of Afro-Latin American and Afro-Latinx studies and the global issues at its core. 

Each year, the GSC selects as its Faculty Fellow one outstanding University of Pittsburgh colleague whose scholarship advances the Center's mission. Jacques Bromberg is Assistant Professor in the Department of Classics and a specialist in ancient Greek literature and history. As the 2019-2020 GSC Faculty Fellow, Dr. Bromberg  convened a yearlong speaker series entitled "Classics and the Global" dedicated to highlighting the ways in which the study of antiquity can inform the study of globalization, and vice versa. Speakers in the series will present public lectures throughout the year, and selected lectures will be published in the inaugural issue of Global Antiquities, a new open-access e-journal. This publication united the sources, approaches, and methodologies of Classical Studies, Ancient History, and Global Studies and aimed to spark conversations and collaborations between professionals in these and related fields.

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 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.

Terry Smith, FAHA, CIHA, is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at the University of Pittsburgh, and Professor in the Division of Philosophy, Art and Critical Thought at the European Graduate School. He is also Faculty at Large in the Curatorial Program of the School of Visual Arts, New York. His major research interests are contemporary art of the world, including its institutional and social contexts; the histories of multiple modernities and modernisms; the history and theory of contemporaneity; and the historiography of art history and art criticism. He has special expertise in international contemporary art (practice, theory, institutions, markets), American visual cultures since 1870, and Australia art since settlement, including Aboriginal art. Current graduate students under his supervision are working on topics such as critical global practices, new media art, alternative avant-gardes, artists’ collectives, the history of conceptualism, aspects of cultural policy, and histories of art writing. He teaches the undergraduate course Introduction to Contemporary Art, and a graduate seminar on theories of modernity and contemporaneity. Terry Smith utilized his GSC Faculty Fellowship award to support a public discussion on the theme Coevality: Ethical Being in a Time of Total Change. "Does the Framework Convention on Climate Change, formally affirmed by 195 nations in Paris on December 12, 2015, signal a turning point in our ability to work in the common interests of all sentient beings and of the worlds in which we live? The negotiators acknowledged the inequalities evident between and within nations, the differences between cultures, individual and group diversity, and the uneven development of institutions, while at the same time presumed the equal value of all parties, places, and polities. The Convention creates a framework for a process for addressing the global problem of climate change that, if followed closely, will be pursued in the same spirit in which it was conceived--one that affirmed, rather than denied, coevalness in all relationships."  

Jackie Smith’s research focuses on the how globalization impacts people and communities, and how social movements for the environment, health, and economic justice have advanced transformative struggles. She has documented long-term trends in transnational social movement organizations and coalitions, in addition to research on connections between global politics and activism in cities and communities. Smith is currently engaged in participatory research with Pittsburgh and with national human rights organizers and engaged in work to connect municipalities with United Nations human rights work.

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.