Nuria Alonso García

Nuria Alonso García is a Professor in Global Studies at Providence College and directs the M.A. in Global Education & TESOL and the M.Ed. in Urban Teaching. Her professional career has been dedicated to the study of second language acquisition (SLA), critical language pedagogies, curriculum development and teacher education. She entered the Applied Linguistics field as an undergraduate in Spain, and throughout her doctoral studies and extensive academic engagement in Latin America, Russia, United States and Western Europe, she has gained a more profound understanding and praxis of how language, identity and cultural constructs intersect. Her research focuses on how culturally responsive practices promote inclusivity in learning and how civic engagement and experiential learning support an ecology of education across borders and foster reciprocal partnerships. She has led community engagement projects in Argentina, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Mexico and Nicaragua and collaborated with linguists and aspiring teachers from Russia during her Fulbright appointment at the Saint Petersburg State Polytechnical University Institute of Humanities, where she remains a visiting scholar. Read more.

Maria Bose

Maria Bose joins the department of Global Studies from Clemson University, where she was an Assistant Professor of Media & Cultural Studies. Her research and teaching address late-twentieth- and twenty-first-century culture’s ever-mutating relation to an increasingly militant neoliberal world order newly rebalanced by Asia. A series of essays tracks isomorphisms between technical and literary systems in the contemporary novel of ethnicity, showing how a remarkable number of anglophone writers develop a “postracial” narrative form keyed at once to race’s declining political salience and its rising technical abstraction. Earlier projects center on corporate branding and the visual rhetoric of environmentalism in Pixar animation and Silicon Valley architecture; and, still earlier ones, on branding and political authorship in postmodern and contemporary novels. Her most recent work is on cinematic video games, which she reads as ambivalent totems of de-globalization: artifacts of a world-system integrated beyond historical precedent yet keener than ever to disconnect, jostling to reduce economic interdependencies and heighten comparative advantages at a moment of profound social and political dysfunction.

Bose’s book-in-progress, Cinema’s Hegemony: Medium & Empire at the Start of the Asian Century, is a study of the U.S./China geopolitical conjuncture and the evolution of the culture/power nexus, as manifested by the twenty-first-century ambitions of the American and Chinese film industries. Responding to the “death of cinema” claims that began circulating in the early nineties—when digital turns in media production and distribution, in tandem with the growing popularity and expanding market share of various “new media,” conditioned the perception that film as a medium and industry was under existential threat—the book argues that film cathects its existential anxieties and seeks to preserve its cultural primacy by way of the national-imperialist genres that have historically consolidated its relation to the hegemonic state. 

She is pleased to advise students with interests in any aspect of contemporary global visual media (television, film, video games), literature, and politics.

Kara Cebulko

Kara Cebulko is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Anthropology with a joint appointment in the Department of Global Studies. Her current research focuses on how legal status and other forms of stratification shape the transition to and experience of young adulthood for 1.5- generation immigrants. She teaches courses on migration, borders, and globalization and is the author of one book Documented, Undocumented, and Something Else: The Incorporation of Children of Brazilian Immigrants and has published in a number of journals, including Sociological Quarterly, the Journal of Marriage and Family, The Journal of Family Studies, American Behavioral Scientist, Ethnicities, and Sociological Perspectives. Read More.

Bilal Ibrahim

Bilal Ibrahim is an Assistant Professor of Global Studies. He studies a flourishing tradition of theology, philosophy, science, and Sufism produced from 12th century and after across the Islamicate world. His current projects explore the critical transformations and interactions that develop between the “rational sciences” and “religious” or “scriptural sciences”, beginning with the pivotal role of the well-known theologian, Fakhr al-Din al-Razi (d. 1210). His current book manuscript is entitled, The Forgotten Tradition: Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī and the Expansion of the Islamic Sciences.

Nicholas Longo, Department Chair

Nicholas V. Longo is the chair of the Department of Global Studies Professor of Global Studies at Providence College. He also co-directs the Dialogue, Inclusion, and Democracy (Lab) which focuses on using deliberative, community-based pedagogies to promote equity and democracy. He is committed to working collaboratively with students and community partners in areas such as civic education, engaged learning, deliberative pedagogy, and youth political engagement. His most recent co-edited books include Creating Space for Democracy and Deliberative Pedagogy and Nick is currently co-creating projects related to social solidarity, civic professionalism, and community-based art. Read More.

Ana Cláudia São Bernardo

Ana Cláudia São Bernardo (she, her, hers) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Global Studies at Providence College. In 2020-2021, she held the position of Zemurray-Stone postdoctoral fellow in Brazilian Studies at the Roger Thayer Stone Center for Latin American Studies at Tulane University. She has an MA and PhD in Lusophone Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics from the University of Minnesota and a BA in Comparative Literature from the Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP) in São Paulo, Brazil. Her research interests include Afro-Brazilian cultures and literature, Black Diaspora Studies and Black Feminist Studies. She is currently revising her book manuscript, “From the Dumpster to the Bookshelf: Black Women Writers in Brazil and the Quest for Space.” She has worked in the equivalent of K-12 education in Brazil for several years and as a lecturer for the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Maryland. Ana is an Afro-Brazilian woman from the outskirts of São Paulo, a fan of capoeira, and the proud daughter of a family of domestic workers.

Trina Vithayathil

Trina Vithayathil is an Associate Professor of Global Studies. She received her Ph.D in Sociology from Brown University, where she was a NSF Graduate Research Fellow, Fulbright-Hays Fellow, and NIH Pre-Doctoral Trainee in Demography. She also holds a M.A in Sociology from Brown, a M.P.P in Political and Economic Development from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, and a B.A in Geology from Carleton College. Her research and teaching interests include Political Sociology, Social Inequality, Comparative Race, Political Economy, Sociology of Knowledge, Social Demography, and Globalization and Development. Read More…

Magali García-Pletsch

Magali is an Adjunct Instructor of Global Studies, and a proud alumna of the Global Studies department. After a year of service as an AmeriCorps VISTA, she returned to PC as the Program Coordinator with the Feinstein Institute for Public Service. As Program Coordinator, Magali oversaw the global service-learning program, where she co-facilitated courses that traveled to Tijuana, Mexico, Cape Town, South Africa, and El Manzano Uno, Nicaragua. She left PC to attend the University of Pennsylvania, where she earned her M.S.Ed. in International Educational Development. After briefly living in Philadelphia, La, Paz, Bolivia, and her hometown of Laredo, TX, she returned to New England, where she now splits her time between Boston and Rhode Island. While not teaching at PC, she works with the Refugee & Immigration Services department at Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Boston, as the program manager of Safe Passages, a program that supports young people who migrated to the U.S. as unaccompanied migrant children.

Jim Tull

After serving for 12 years as co-director of Amos House, a Catholic Worker-inspired homeless shelter and soup kitchen in Providence, Jim began teaching courses in Community Service and Peace Studies at Providence College (PC) and Philosophy at the Community College of Rhode Island (CCRI) in 1995 as he co-parented his young children, Sofia and Nelson. Jim has continued since then to teach Philosophy at CCRI (including at the state prison) and, since 2006, Global Studies at PC. During this time, he has facilitated workshops on cultural transformation, community building, systems thinking and deep ecology. In 2015, Jim co-founded a cooperative homestead and farm in Chepachet, RI. He is the author of Positive Thinking in a Dark Age: Essays on the Global Transition (Oct. 2016).