Degree Program Offered: Doctor of Philosophy

Director of Doctoral Program: Karen A. Franck (973-596-3092; email: karen.a.franck@njit.edu)

Director of Urban Environment Specialization: Karen A. Franck (973-596-3092; email: karen.a.franck@njit.edu)

Codirectors of Global Urban Studies Specialization: Jamie Lew (973-596-5331; email: jamielew@rutgers.edu); Mara Sidney (973-353-5787; email: msidney@rutgers.edu)

Website: https://sasn.rutgers.edu/academics-admissions/graduate-programs/global-urban-studies-gus

Members of the Faculty

Professors:

Jennifer Austin, Ph.D., Cornell
First and second language acquisition; language contact; the effects of bilingualism on language and cognition

Elise Boddie, J.D., Harvard Law School
Constitutional law; civil rights; state and local government law

Steven Diner, Ph.D., Chicago
U.S. urban history; U.S. immigration history; history of American higher education; U.S. progressive era

R. Brian Ferguson, Ph.D., Columbia
Cultural anthropology; anthropology of war; ethnic conflict; state-tribe interaction; policing; Puerto Rico

Jyl Josephson, Ph.D., Maryland (College Park)
Gender, sexuality, and public policy, primarily in the context of U.S. social policy

Arthur Powell, Ph.D., Rutgers
Mathematics education; ethnomathematics; urban education

Alan R. Sadovnik, Ph.D., New York
Sociology of education; urban educational policy; qualitative research

Lee Slater, Ph.D., Lancaster
Near-surface geophysics; earth and environmental studies

Robert Snyder, Ph.D., New York
Journalism and American studies

John Kuo Wei Tchen, Ph.D., Wisconsin
Understanding the multiple presents, pasts, and futures of American cities and metropolitan areas; identity formations; trans-local, cross-cultural communications; archives and epistemologies; progressive pedagogy

David Troutt, J.D., Harvard Law School
Metropolitan dimensions of race, class, and legal structure; intellectual property; torts; critical legal theory

Rose Cuison Villazor, J.D., American
Immigration and citizenship law; property law; Asian Americans and the law; equal protection law; critical race theory

Associate Professors:

Jason M. Barr, Ph.D., Columbia
Urban economics; economics of education; computational economics

Ira Cohen, Ph.D., Wisconsin (Madison)
Sociology of action in everyday life; contemporary and classical social theory; the sociology of modernity; the history of social thought

Eva Giloi, Ph.D., Princeton
19th- and 20th-century European history; modern Germany

Kimberly Holton, Ph.D., Northwestern
Performative modes of conflict and collaboration within the Portuguese and Brazilian immigrant communities in Newark; Spanish and Portuguese studies

Jamie Lew, Ph.D., Teachers College, Columbia
Race and ethnic relations; urban education and policy; immigration and international migration; comparative and international education

Sean Mitchell, Ph.D., Chicago
Sociocultural anthropology; war and violence; race, ethnicity, and nationalism; governance and citizenship; social movements; science and technology studies; the politics of inequality

Kusum Mundra, Ph.D., California (Riverside)
Applied econometrics; immigration and international migration; social networks; gender and minority population; nonparametric and semiparametric models

Timothy Raphael, Ph.D., Northwestern
Multidisciplinary scholarship, teaching, and civic engagement that supports research, educational curriculum, public humanities programming, and civic partnerships with community and cultural organizations around immigration

Isaias Rojas-Perez, Ph.D., Johns Hopkins
Topics in social and cultural theory, focusing on sovereignty, governmentality, violence, rights, and time and memory; the materiality of politics and the politics of materiality; the ritualization of death in Andean Peru

Mara Sidney, Ph.D., Colorado
Urban politics and policy; race/ethnicity and politics; immigration; public policy

Genese Sodikoff, Ph.D., Michigan
Political economy of biodiversity loss, conservation, and restoration; sociology and anthropology

Assistant Professors:

Zahra Ali, Ph.D., Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (France)
Women, gender, and feminisms; youth, civil society, social and political movements in contexts of war and conflict; contemporary Islam(s); Islamisms and Muslim communities

Nermin Allam, Ph.D., Alberta (Canada)
Social movements; gender politics; Middle Eastern and North African studies; political Islam

Janice Gallagher, Ph.D., Cornell
Human rights; Latin America, especially Mexico and Colombia; social movements; international law; transnational advocacy networks; legal mobilization

Alison Howell, Ph.D., York
International security and critical security studies; military organizations and warfare; global mental health, trauma, and resilience; humanitarianism; military science and scientific racism; science and technology studies; historical international relations; feminist, critical race, and disability theory

Nicole Kraus, Ph.D., Wisconsin
Social stratification; nationalism and xenophobia; race and ethnicity; migration and globalization; research methods; the Russian Federation and former Soviet Union

Domingo Morel, Ph.D., Brown
The ways state policies help expand or diminish political inequality among historically marginalized populations

Rachel Mundy, Ph.D., New York
Twentieth-century sonic culture with interests at the juncture of music, the history of science, and animal studies

Mary Rizzo, Ph.D., Minnesota
Food studies; representations of cities; inclusive public history

Melissa Valle, Ph.D., Columbia
How race, ethnicity, gender and class are encoded in the value of urban spaces; sociology and anthropology and the Department of African American and African Studies