Administered by the Global Studies Center at the University Center for International Studies (UCIS), the UCIS Visiting Professorship in Contemporary Global Issues brings eminent scholars and practitioners to the University of Pittsburgh for extended academic residencies. This prestigious program is designed to deepen campus engagement around critical global issues by fostering meaningful, sustained interaction between visiting experts and the university community.
During their residency, visiting professors contribute to the intellectual life of the university through public lectures, workshops, class visits, and collaborative research initiatives. By creating opportunities for cross-disciplinary dialogue and long-term collaboration, the program enriches global learning and advances scholarly inquiry on the transnational challenges shaping our world today.
Past Visiting Professors in Contemporary Global Issues
Dr. Gabriel García Ochoa was born in Mexico City, and has lived in Australia for twenty years. He is the Director of the Global Immersion Guarantee program at Monash University. Gabriel is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. He is a writer, academic, and professional translator. His research focuses on the role that stories play in intercultural communication. He has taught internationally, in the Indo-Pacific, Asia, Europe, and North America.
Emily Murphy is a Lecturer in Children’s Literature at Newcastle University (UK), with research interests in international children's literature, childhood studies, and global citizenship education. Her monograph, Growing Up with America: Youth, Myth, and National Identity, 1945 to Present (University of Georgia Press, 2020), was the winner of the 2021 International Research Society for Children’s Literature Book Award. The book explores the role of the figure of the adolescent in challenging national myths about U.S. identity, and looks at both canonical American novels and young adult fiction, including Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita and M.T. Anderson’s Feed, to support its argument. She has published essays in The Lion and the Unicorn, Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, and Jeunesse, and her work also appears in Prizing in Children’s Literature (ed. Kenneth Kidd and Joseph Thomas) and Connecting Childhood and Old Age in Popular Media (ed. Vanessa Joosen). Currently, she is working on a new book project entitled The Anarchy of Children’s Archives: Children’s Literature and Global Citizenship Education in the American Century, for which she has received an Ezra Jack Keats/Janina Domanska Research Fellowship from the De Grummond Children’s Literature Collection and an International Youth Library Research Fellowship.
Leilani Farha is the former UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Housing and Global Director of The Shift. Her work is animated by the principle that housing is a social good, not a commodity. Leilani has helped develop global human rights standards on the right to housing, including through her topical reports on homelessness, the financialization of housing, informal settlements, rights-based housing strategies, and the first UN Guidelines for the implementation of the right to housing. She is the central character in the documentary PUSH regarding the financialization of housing, screening around the world. Leilani Launched The Shift in 2017 with the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights and United Cities and Local Government.
Dr. Shareen Hertel is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Connecticut, jointly appointed with the university’s Human Rights Institute. Drawing on 20 years of policy work with United Nations agencies, foundations, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in the United States, Latin America and South Asia, her scholarship focuses on economic rights, social movements, and global supply chains.Dr. Hertel is Editor of The Journal of Human Rights; co-editor of the Routledge International Studies Intensives book series; and serves on the editorial boards of Human Rights Review and Human Rights and Human Welfare. Her published work includes Tethered Fates: Companies, Communities and Rights at Stake (Oxford University Press 2019); Activists Beyond Borders: Conflict & Change Among Transnational Activists (Cornell University Press, 2006); Economic Rights: Conceptual, Measurement & Policy Issues (Cambridge University Press 2007 with Lanse Minkler); Human Rights in the United States: Beyond Exceptionalism (Cambridge University Press, 2011 with Kathryn Libal); along with multiple articles and book chapters. She holds a doctorate in Political Science (2003), Master’s degrees in Political Science (1999) and International Affairs (1992) all from Columbia University, as well as a BA in International Relations (1988) from The College of Wooster. Dr. Hertel's visit was sponsored by the Global Studies Center, the Center for Sustainable Business in the Katz Graduate School of Business, and the Office of the Provost.