Edward A. Alpers is Research Professor of History at the University of California, Los Angeles. He has also taught at the Universities of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania (1966-1968), and the Somali National University, Lafoole (1980). In 1994 he served as President of the African Studies Association (USA). Alpers has published widely on the history of East Africa and the Indian Ocean. His major publications include Ivory and Slaves in East Central Africa(1975); Walter Rodney: Revolutionary and Scholar, co-edited with Pierre-Michel Fontaine (1982); Africa and the West: A Documentary History from the Slave Trade to Independence, with William H. Worger and Nancy Clark (2001; 2nd ed. 2010); History, Memory and Identity, co-edited with Vijayalakshmi Teelock (2001); Sidis and Scholars: Essays on African Indians, co-edited with Amy Catlin-Jairazbhoy (2004); Slavery and Resistance in Africa and Asia, co-edited with Gwyn Campbell and Michael Salman (2005); Slave Routes and Oral Tradition in Southeastern Africa, co-edited with Benigna Zimba and Allen F. Isaacman (2005); Resisting Bondage in Indian Ocean Africa and Asia, co-edited with Gwyn Campbell and Michael Salman (2007); Cross-Currents and Community Networks: The History of the Indian Ocean World, co-edited with Himanshu Prabha Ray (2007); East Africa and the Indian Ocean (2009); The Indian Ocean in World History (2014); Changing Horizons of African History, co-edited with Awet T. Weldemichael and Anthony A. Lee (2017); and Connectivity in Motion: Island Hubs in the Indian Ocean World, co-edited with Burkhard Schnepel (2018). Professor Alpers served as chair for sixty-two Ph.D. dissertations.
Rainer F. Buschmann is professor and founding faculty member in the history program at the California State University Channel Islands. He has formerly taught at Hawaii Pacific University and Purdue University. He published four books: Oceans in World History (2007), Anthropology’s Global Histories: The Ethnographic Frontier in German New Guinea, 1870-1935 (2009), Iberian Visions of the Pacific Ocean, 1507-1899 (2014), and the co-authored Navigating the Spanish Lake: The Pacific in the Iberian World, 1521-1898 (2014). Most recently he co-edited the encyclopedia The World’s Oceans: Geography, History, and the Environment. In addition to his publications, Professor Buschmann edits the world history section of the History Compass and is co-editor of a new book series entitled Nebraska Studies in Pacific Worlds.
Andrew Gardner is a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Washington. A sociocultural anthropologist and ethnographer by training, for the past two decades Andrew’s fieldwork has been focused on the places, peoples and societies who interact in the petroleum-rich states of the Arabian peninsula.. He has conducted extensive fieldwork in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Qatar, and between 2008 and 2010 he also served as an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Qatar University. In addition to numerous journal articles and book chapters, he is the author of City of Strangers: Gulf Migration and the Indian Community in Bahrain (Cornell, 2010), which explores the experiences of Indian transnational migrants in Bahrain and the society that hosts them. His current scholarly pursuits explore the juncture between transnational migration, urbanization, and urban planning in Doha, Qatar.
Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky is a historian of the modern Middle East and the Ottoman Empire, with a focus on refugee migration. He is finishing his Ph.D. at Stanford University. Vladimir's current research examines how Muslim refugees transformed the late Ottoman Empire. Vladimir is broadly interested in migrations in the modern Middle East, international humanitarianism, and global refugee resettlement.
Alan Karras is Associate Director of IAS. In his more than twenty years at Berkeley, he has taught courses on world history, classical political economy, Caribbean history, and the history of transnational crime—among others. His research interests are in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world, and global interactions more broadly, especially as they relate to transnational transgressions like smuggling, fraud, and corruption. He is the author of Smuggling: Corruption and Contraband in World History (2010), Sojourners in the Sun: Scots Migrants in Jamaica and the Chesapeake, 1740-1800 (1993), and the coeditor, with John R. McNeill, of Atlantic American Societies: From Columbus through Abolition, 1492-1888 (1992). He also has co-edited a book, Encounters Old and New, with Laura Mitchell, that makes a case for historians to engage more with the public. He served as one of the editors for the forthcoming Cambridge Dictionary of World History and was on the board of editors for Cambridge University Press's multi-volume Cambridge World History.
Katerina Linos is a co-faculty director of the Miller Institute for Global Challenges and the Law and a recent recipient of a research fellowship from the Carnegie corporation. She is using the Carnegie fellowship, along with support from the Center for Technology Research to study an urgent global challenge: the European refugee crisis. Her work is focused in Greece and examines how misinformation and rumors are created and propagated; how they impede refugees' ability to claim basic human rights guaranteed by international law; and how new technologies can be used to close the communications gap. Linos is also interested in why law reforms and policy innovations spread around the world in waves. Her book The Democratic Foundations of Policy Diffusion: How Health, Family, and Employment Laws Spread Across Countries (Oxford University Press, 2013), explains the politics of legal transplantation. Other areas of research include the law and politics of the European Union, and uneven international implementation of human rights.
Lauren Markham is a writer and educator based in Berkeley. A longtime educator working with immigrant and refugee communities, she is the author of The Far Away Brothers: Two Young Migrants and the Making of an American Life (winner of the 2018 Ridenhour Prize for Truth Telling). Her writing on youth, migration and the environment has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, California Sunday, Mother Jones, Harper's, and elsewhere. She works at Oakland International High School, where she oversees community programs for newcomer youth.
Kasturi Ray received her BA from Columbia University; her MA from UC-Berkeley, and her PhD from Brown University. She is currently a tenured professor of Women and Gender Studies at San Francisco State University, where she teaches courses on women of color and third world feminism; feminist theory and feminist pedagogy. She is also co-director of the South Asian Studies program, for which she focuses on historical and contemporary migrations to the area. Her first book project is entitled "Trade in Maids," and focuses on literature written by and about domestic workers in the 20th century; her current book project is on gendered labor and health crises in the current Uber and taxi worker industries.
Hwaji Shin is an associate professor in Sociology at University of San Francisco. Her research focuses on the political sociology with an emphasis on social movement; race and ethnicity; globalization and colonialism; categorical and spatial inequality and on the history, theory and sociology of migration, citizenship and nationalism. Her published work includes articles on the influence of globalization on social movements among Korean minority groups in Japan and one of her article received the best scholarly article award from the American Sociological Association Section on Global and Transnational Sociology.