Meet the Executive Committee
Carla Calargé is the coordinator of the major in Global Studies. She is Professor of French and Francophone studies at Florida Atlantic University. She has published extensively on the French-speaking novel and films of the MENA region. She co-edited a special issue of The Cincinnati Romance Review on Assia Djebar (2011), and a book on Haiti and the Americas published with Mississippi U.P in 2013. Her monograph Liban. Mémoires fragmentées d’une guerre obsédante (Brill 2017) examines the anamnesis of the (civil) war as expressed in Lebanese cultural production between 2000 and 2015. With Alexandra Gueydan-Turek, she co-edited a special issue of Nouvelles Etudes Francophones (2019) that offers new readings of the margins of/in French and Francophone graphic novels. Calargé’s latest articles examine the Lebanese cultural production in the aftermath of the explosion that destroyed the port of Beirut on August 4th, 2020. Since 2012, Carla has been serving as secretary-treasurer of the Congrès des Etudes Francophones (CIEF) a leading organization of scholars specializing in Francophone Studies.
Regis M. Fox, Associate Professor of English at Florida Atlantic University, earned a Ph. D in English from the University of California, Riverside. Her primary research interests include Nineteenth-Century American Literatures, Feminist Theory, and African-American Literary and Cultural Studies. She has published in such journals as Women's Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal and the Journal of American Studies, and in edited collections, including A Determined Life: The Elizabeth Keckley Reader; Afro-Caribbean Women's Writing and Early American Literature; Trauma, Tresses, and Truth: Untangling Our Hair Through Personal Narratives; and The Routledge Companion to Intersectionalities. She released her first book, Resistance Reimagined: Black Women's Critical Thought as Survival (University Press of Florida) in 2017.
Carter Koppelman holds a B.A. in International Relations and Latin American Studies from Tufts University, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California, Berkeley. He is currently Assistant Professor of Sociology at Florida Atlantic University, and a faculty affiliate of the Centers for Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (WGSS) and Peace, Justice, and Human Rights (PJHR). He was also the 2022 faculty fellow of FAU’s Study of the Americas Initiative.
As a scholar, Dr. Koppelman is broadly interested in how individuals and movements pursue dignity in unequal societies, and how opportunities to do so are structured by state projects and economic forces. Focusing on the working-class peripheries of Latin American cities, his research has examined the effects of international NGO projects, municipal community develop programs, social housing policies, and more recently financial inclusion initiatives. He uses political ethnography to study the impacts of different kinds of interventions on city-dwellers’ everyday lives, sense of citizenship, and engagements with state agencies. Dr. Koppelman has published research in Qualitative Sociology, Social Politics, Latin American Perspectives, and City & Community, and recently contributed a chapter on São Paulo’s contributions to global urban sociology for a new Oxford Handbook of Urban Sociology.
Dr. Koppelman has collaborated with colleagues in the College of Arts & Letters to teach interdisciplinary Global Studies courses on topics of global migration, citizenship, race, and urbanism. He also teaches sociology courses on cities, sociological theory, globalization, development, and social change. In all his courses he seeks to enable students to make sense of the global and historical forces that affect their lives and communities and empower them to engage critically with global and local social issues.
Chris Robé is Professor of Cinema and Media Studies. His primary research concerns the use of media by various communities and social movements. In the twenty-first century, media does not simply offer a representational platform for different communities but more importantly serves as a material practice to engage in collective struggles for a wide variety of purposes.
He has written about U.S. radical film culture in the 1930s in his book Left of Hollywood: Cinema, Modernism, and the Emergence of U.S. Radical Film Culture (U of Texas Press, 2010). Breaking the Spell: A History of Anarchist Filmmakers, Videotape Guerrillas, and Digital Ninjas (PM Press, 2017) explores the emergence of anarchist-based video activism. His co-edited collection with Stephen Charbonneau InsUrgent Media from the Front: A Media Activism Reader (Indiana University Press, 2020) investigates global trends in media activism through a historic lens. His most recent book Abolishing Surveillance: Digital Media Activism and State Repression (PM Press, 2023) concerns the relationship between video/digital media activism and state repression pertaining to animal rights campaigns, counter-summit protesting, Latinx copwatching and community organizing, and Muslim-American youth resistance. If you would like to set up a speaking engagement related to the newest book, feel free to contact his via email.
Renat Shaykhutdinov is an Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Political Science at Florida Atlantic University. He joined Florida Atlantic University in 2007 after completing his PhD at Texas A&M University. Renat holds BA degrees in Political Science & International Relations, and Sociology from the University of Bosphorus in Istanbul, Turkey.
His research interests include comparative and international politics, ethnic conflict, power-sharing arrangements, religion and state, postcolonial politics, and the politics of the former Soviet Union and Central and Eastern Europe. Renat Shaykhutdinov, a native of Kazan in the Middle Volga Region, is fluent in multiple languages, including Tatar, Russian, and Turkish.
In addition, Renat serves as the founding Secretary of the ISA Global IR Section (GIRS) and holds the position of Chair of Awards for the ISA Religion and IR (REL) section.