Participating Faculty
Vincent Biondo—Religious Studies
Vincent Biondo is Assistant Professor of Western Religions in the Department of Philosophy. As a Historian of Religions specializing in Islam, he is committed to better understanding the relationships between Jews, Christians, and Muslims. While pursuing his Ph.D. in Religious Studies from the University of California, Santa Barbara, Vince served as a coordinator for a three year Ford Foundation project titled "Religious Pluralism in Southern California." He also earned a grant to pursue comparative research in the riot towns of Northern England. The architecture and politics chapters of his dissertation "Islam and Public Space in the U.S. and Britain" have been accepted for publication. He is currently pursuing a book project on Religion and Economics and has recently agreed to co-edit a three volume reference work titled Religion in the Practice of Daily Life.
Sameh El Kharbawy—Art & Design
Dr. A. Sameh El Kharbawy is Professor of Art and Design at California State University, Fresno. He received his Ph.D. in Architecture from Illinois Institute of Technology and holds a Master of Business Administration, a Master of Architecture and a Bachelor of Architectural Engineering. Dr. El Kharbawy’s work focuses mainly on questions of modernity, democracy and liberalization in global contexts and multiple disciplines, exploring them in theory and in practice. He is currently writing a book on the “Ends of Imperium: Rethinking the Architecture of Modernity at the Limits of Modern Architecture.” Prior to joining California State University, Dr. El Kharbawy held teaching positions at Helwan University, the Egyptian-American University, and the University of North Carolina. Dr. ElKharbawy also serves as an advisor to the Joint Egyptian-European Partnership Chamber, the Board of Directors of the Egyptian-American University and Helwan University. An associate of the American Institute of Architects, and member of the United States Green Building Council, the Interior Design Educators Council, the Egyptian Syndicate of Architects, the Cairo Research Institute, the Architecture Research Institute, and the Society of Architectural Historians, Dr. El Kharbawy serves on the advisory boards of the Center for the Study of Architecture in the Arab Region (CSAAR) and the Environmental Design Research Association. He has served as a consultant to the Government of Egypt.
Sasan Fayazmanesh—Professor of Economics
Dr. Fayazmanesh is an expert on Iran. He has developed and taught courses on the Middle East. His fields of study are political economy, economic development, monetary history and theory, money and banking, history, methodology and philosophy of economics, and political economy of the Middle East. His writings have appeared in such places as the Journal of the History of Economic Thought, Research in the History of Economic Thought and Methodology, Encyclopedia of Political Economy, the Review of Radical Political Economics, History of Economic Ideas, UCLA Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, South Asia Bulletin, CounterPunch and Z-Magazine. He has edited, with Professor Marc Tool, a two volume book of essays entitled Institutionalist Method and Value and Institutionalist Theory and Applications, published by Edward Elgar in 1998. Dr. Fayazmanesh's latest book is entitled Money and Exchange: Folktales and Reality, published in 2006 by Routledge. His forthcoming book, which will be published by Routledge, is entitled The United States and Iran: Sanctions, Wars and the Policy of Dual Containment.
James Mullooly —Department of Anthropology
Director of the Institute of Public Anthropology
James Mullooly is an Applied Cultural Anthropologist with a great deal of interest in improving the quality of life in Fresno by focusing of key issues such as education, commerce and industry. He is currently an assistant professor of anthropology in the College of Social Sciences. He has lived in Jamaica, Mali and Egypt and has conducted fieldwork in Egypt and the United States (in inner cities in New York and the Midwest). He works in the fields of Ethnography, Applied Anthropology and Ethnomethodology.
James holds a BA in Anthropology and History from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, two Master’s degrees, one in Teaching English as a Foreign Language (American University in Cairo) and another in Anthropology and Education (Columbia University) and a PhD in Anthropology and Education (Columbia University). His dissertation, “Work, play and consequences: What Counts in a Successful Middle School” (2003) is an ethnography of an alternative middle school for Hispanic immigrants of low socio-economic status that has fostered great academic success amongst its graduates.
Mary Husain—Mass Communication, Speech Communication and Women's Studies
Mary Husain has taught courses in mass communication, speech communication, and women’s studies at California State University, Fresno. Areas of instruction include cultural studies, gender studies, and media persuasion. She received her B.A. and M.A. in Communication at California State University, Fresno, and is completing her doctorate at California State University, Fresno/University of California Davis, Joint Doctoral Program. Her research focuses on the impacts of media representation of the Middle East and Islam, in entertainment and news genres. Recent publications include an article coauthored with Kevin Ayotte entitled, “Securing Afghan Women: Neocolonialism, Epistemic Violence, and the Rhetoric of the Veil, published by National Women’s Studies Association Journal in 2005.
Manuchehr Shahrokhi—Craig School of Business
Manuchehr Shahrokhi is a Craig Fellow Professor of Global Business - Finance at Craig School of Business at California State University-Fresno since 1986. He has also served as Director of Graduate Business Programs 1989-1992. He has been a visiting professor at Harvard (1992-1999), Moscow MBA program offered by Cal State Hayward. He has also taught finance courses, as distinguished lecturer, for Austrian University of Technology and University for Business and Technology in Kosova. He is the founding editor of the Global Finance Journal, a refereed publication by Elsevier Publishing since 1989 with worldwide distribution. He has founded and serves as Executive Director of Global Finance Association - Conference, a network of over 600 scholars and practitioners worldwide. He has published over 75 articles in top journals and authored books in International Business and Finance. He has earned his BA from Tehran Business School, MBA from George Washington University and Ph.D. from the Ohio State University.
Partow Hooshmandrad—Music and Iranian Studies
Partow Hooshmandrad holds a Ph.D. in ethnomusicology from the University of California, Berkeley. She has done extensive research on the cultural heritage of the Kurdish Ahl-i Haqq (Yarsan) since 2000. As a scholar and a performer she specializes in the devotional practices of the Ahl-i Haqq of Guran including the musical repertoire, the texts, and the rituals; as well as Iranian classical music. She has won several awards for her research endeavors including generous grants from the National Geographic Conservation Trust Fund, Alfred Hertz Memorial Scholarship, and the Kurdish National Congress. Her publications include: 2009, “Meaning and Sacralization: Tanbur of the Kurdish Ahl-i Haqq of Guran.” Journal of Kurdish Studies Vol. 7. 2009, “Life as a Stage: Devotional Practices of the Ahl-i Haqq in Kurdistan,” World of Music Vol. 49/3, special edition ‘Musical Stages: Music and Context in the Persianite World.’ 2008, “Kurdish Ahl-i Haqq Musical Practice,” Encyclopedia Iranica, Yarshater, Ehsan, ed. New York: Bibliotheca Iranica. She is currently working on her book titled Sacred Musical Tradition of the Kurdish Ahl-i Haqq of Guran (University of Tehran Press), to be followed by a Persian translation. Before joining the academic community at CSU Fresno, Partow taught at the University of Kurdistan, Hawler, in the Federal Region of Kurdistan, Iraq.
Affiliated Faculty
Steve Adisasmito-Smith—World Literature
Steve Adisasmito-Smith teaches World Literature, including Southwest Asian literature in English. He received a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. His research involves American, British, and South Asian literature, and issues in translation and cross-cultural interpretation. His work was awarded the 1998 Horst Frenz Prize by the American Comparative Literature Association. He has written on the connections among British Orientalists, American Transcendentalists, and Indian Nationalists, and the translation of Sanskrit scriptures into English.
Samina Najmi—Multi-ethnic Literature
Dr. Samina Najmi has taught courses in multiethnic American literature, cultural studies, and gender studies at Babson College in Wellesley. She received her B.A. in English from the University of Karachi, Pakistan, and her graduate degrees from Tufts University. Aside from various essays, her publications include Form and Transformation in Asian American Literature (U of Washington P, 2005), coedited with Zhou Xiaojing; White Women in Racialized Spaces (SUNY 2002), coedited with Rajini Srikanth, and the reissue of Onoto Watanna’s 1903 novel The Heart of Hyacinth (U of Washington P, 2000). Her teaching and research focus on both the disciplinary and the interdisciplinary, with special interest in the intersections of multiethnic American literature and postcolonial/world literature.
Chris Golston-Linguistics
Chris Golston is professor and chair in the Department of Linguistics. As a linguist specializing in the phonology of human languages, he stays abreast of how the consonants, vowels, and syllables of the 6000 languages of the world pattern. His research includes a lot of joint work with others, including the syntax of Greek, Hittite, and Latin (with Brian Agbayani, also of Fresno State); the poetic meter of Old, Modern, and Middle English, Classical Arabic, and Greek (with Tomas Riad, Stockholm University); the phonetics of White Hmong (with Sean Fulop, Fresno State); and laryngeal and laryngealized sounds in the languages of the world (with Wolfgang Kehrein, University of Amsterdam). His favorite language, though, is yours.
Derya Ozgoc-Caglar—Geography
Dr. Derya Ozgoc-Caglar is currently an Assistant Professor of Urban Planning in the Department of Geography. Dr. Ozgoc-Caglar received her bachelor degree in City and Regional Planning from Middle East Technical University (Ankara, Turkey) with a minor in Geographical Information Systems and Remote Sensing in 2002, her masters degree in Urban and Regional Planning from Ball State University (Muncie, Indiana) in 2004, and her Ph.D. from the Department of Forestry and Natural Resources at Purdue University (West Lafayette, Indiana) in 2008. Her research interests lie at the intersection of decision theory, applied decision and spatial analysis techniques, GIScience and economic-environmental models to address land use and environmental and natural resource management decisions, environmental sustainability, and the interactions among urban conditions and environmental amenities.