FACULTY
FACULTY
Rebecca Torres, PhD
Associate professor in the Department of Geography & the Environment; Associate of the Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies (LLILAS); Associate of the Population Research Center (PRC); Affiliate of the Center for Women’s and Gender Studies (CWGS) at UT Austin. She is interested in (im)migration, Children/Youth Geographies, Gender, Feminist Geography, and Activist/Engaged Scholarship. Her main focus is her bi-national, trans-disciplinary team scholars on research focusing on the current situation of refugee/migrant children and youth from Mexico and Central America.
Caroline Faria
A feminist geographer and Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography and the Environment at UT Austin. She draws on feminist, critical race, and postcolonial perspectives to interrogate contemporary workings of nationalism and cosmopolitanism. Her current research, funded by the National Science Foundation, examines the political-economies of the beauty industry in the Gulf-East African region. More at her UT page and at her home website.
Pavithra Vasudevan, PhD
Assistant Professor of African & African Diaspora Studies and Women’s & Gender Studies at The University of Texas at Austin. Her scholarship and teaching are concerned with how racialized peoples and ecologies are devalued in capitalism, and the abolitional possibilities of collective struggle. She incorporates performance, audiovisuals and other arts-based methods to conduct research in collaboration with affected communities. See her website (pavithravasudevan.com) for more information!
Laurel Mei-Singh, PhD
Dr. Laurel Mei-Singh serves as an Assistant Professor of Geography and Asian American Studies at UT Austin. Dr. Mei-Singh’s research interests include environmental justice, militarization, the relationship of race and indigeneity to histories of war, fences and self-determination, abolition, racial capitalism and the Pacific. Her current project develops a genealogy of military fences and grassroots struggles for land and livelihood in Wai‘anae, a rural and heavily militarized region of the island of O’ahu in Hawai’i. She comes to UT Austin from the University of Hawai’i Mānoa.
Erin McElroy, PhD
Assistant Professor, Department of American Studies. Dr. McElroy's work focuses on relationships between technology, gentrification, empire, racial dispossession, and housing justice organizing in and between the US and in Romania. Erin's a cofounder of the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project and the Radical Housing Journal, and earned a PhD in Feminist Studies from UC Santa Cruz. Their current book project is "Unbecoming Silicon Valley: Techno Imaginaries and Materialities in Postsocialist Times". McElroy comes to UT from NYU Al Now Institute and where they launched Landlord Tech Watch, a public scholarship and popular education venue for mapping out new technologies that automate eviction and gentrification.
Youjeong Oh, PhD
Associate Professor of Asian Studies and Geography & the Environment at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of PopCity: Korean Popular Culture and the Selling of Place (Cornell, 2018). Her research explores urbanism, development and dispossession, social movement, and media, tourism, and place in East Asia. Dr. Oh’s teaching covers broader issues of compressed modernity, state-society relations, (neo)colonialism, developmentalism, neoliberalism in East and Southeast Asia. Her current research is about (over)development, dispossession, and desires in Jeju, South Korea.
Nazgol Bagheri, PhD
Dr. Bagheri is the Graduate Program Coordinator for the Geography and Environmental Sustainability Program. She is also the coordinator of the COLFA GIS Lab and the organizer of the international GIS Day celebrations. Dr. Bagheri is interested in navigating disciplinary terrain in Geography, Urban Planning, and Social Anthropology to develop a working theoretical model to account for changes in the use and design of public space and the unique relationship between the aesthetics of modern planning, the gendering of spatial boundaries, and the contingent nature of public space in Middle Eastern contexts.
