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 ElKharbawy—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.
Ellen Gruenbaum—Anthropology
Ellen Gruenbaum, Ph.D., is Professor of Anthropology at California State University, Fresno, where until 2003 she served as the Dean of the College of Social Sciences. As a medical anthropologist, Ellen Gruenbaum has focused especially on health issues of Muslim women in Sudan, where she spent five years in the 1970s and returned for four subsequent research trips. In 2004, she served as a Visiting Professor in the Institute for Women, Gender, and Development Studies at Ahfad University for Women in Omdurman, Sudan, where she carried out research on the movement against female genital cutting and the process of change in seven rural communities in central and eastern Sudan. She has served as a research consultant to both UNICEF and CARE on female genital cutting abandonment projects in Sudan. She authored The Female Circumcision Controversy: An Anthropological Perspective (U Pennsylvania Press, 2001) and numerous articles, including “Sexuality Issues in the Movement to Abolish Female Genital Cutting in Sudan” in Medical Anthropology Quarterly (March 2006). At CSU Fresno she has taught courses on Middle Eastern Muslim Communities, Women and Islam, Anthropology of Religion, Emerging Voices after Colonialism, and other cultural anthropology and women’s studies courses.
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.
Jay O’Brien—Anthropology
Dr. Jay O’Brien has taught Anthropology, Development
Studies, History, Economics and Sociology at universities in Sudan, Botswana, Sweden and the USA. He has researched and published extensively on issues of agricultural development, labor markets and ethnicity in Sudan and Africa. His publications include three books, one authored and two co-edited, and articles in such journals as the Review of African Political Economy, American Anthropologist, Journal of Peasant Studies, Labour, Capital and Society, Canadian Journal of African Studies, and Nordic Journal of African Studies, as well as in a number of edited books. His forthcoming book, A Man is not a Man without Two Wives, presents narratives of his experiences during five years of residence in Sudan. Dr. O’Brien teaches two courses on the Middle East at CSU Fresno: History 107, Modern Middle East; and, Economics 183, The Political Economy of the Middle East.
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.
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.