Faculty
Global Studies Faculty
The faculty who teach in the Global Studies Department come from many different disciplines, but share a commitment to engaged student learning. Learn more about some of the faculty who teach in the program below.
Nuria Alonso García
Nuria Alonso García is a Professor in Global Studies at Providence College and directs the M.A. in Global Education u0026 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.
Nuria Alonso García
Maria Bose
Maria Bose joins the department of Global Studies from Clemson University, where she was an Assistant Professor of Media u0026 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.
Maria Bose
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, u003cemu003eDocumented, 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.
Kara Cebulko
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 religiousu 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 titled The Forgotten Tradition: Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī and the Expansion of the Islamic Sciences.
Bilal Ibrahim
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.
Nicholas Longo
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.
Trina Vithayathil
Adjunct Faculty
Samantha Bergbauer
Sam is a proud Rhode Island transplant- originally from New Jersey, she has called Rhode Island home for over 10 years. She graduated from Providence College with a Bachelor’s degree in Public Community Service and a Business Studies certificate. After her undergraduate degree, she completed a year of service with AmeriCorps at RI Campus Compact and earned her Master of Education in School Counseling from Providence College. Sam worked as a Wellness Coordinator at the Nonviolence Institute, an organization she has been involved with for years. In 2019, Sam joined the team at Leadership RI as their College Program u0026 Alumni Coordinator. She oversaw College Leadership RI for three years and loved connecting young leaders throughout the state with their peers and introducing them to everything and everyone in little Rhody! As Director of Community Engagement, she has enjoyed engaging the broader community and building relationships with various stakeholders.
Samantha Bergbauer
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).
Jim Tull
Emily Meehan
On top of Emily’s duties for the Global Studies and Public and Community Service Studies departments, Emily has taken on a roll of teaching Global Studies one-credit course: Global Engagement. Emily received a Bachelor’s of Arts in International Studies from Manhattan College. When she joined Providence College in late 2019, Emily worked towards a Master’s of Education in Higher Education with a Concentration in Global Education, finishing the program in August 2021. Prior to her time at Providence College, Emily completed a year of service with Americorps at Great Oaks Charter School, and worked at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology assisting high school students with grant management.
Emily Meehan
Department of Global Studies
Office Hours: 8:30am-4:30pm
Feinstein 315
globalstudies@providence.edu
Dr. Nicholas Longo
Chair of Global Studies
Feinstein 315
401-865-1207
nlongo@providence.edu
