Newly Inaugurated Mellichamp Chairs in Global Dynamics!

JANET AFARY is a Professor of Religious Studies and Feminist Studies at UC Santa Barbara. She is a native of Iran and a historian of modern Iran and received her PhD from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She served as President of the International Society of Iranian Studies. Her books include: Sexual Politics in Modern Iran (Cambridge UP), The Iranian Constitutional Revolution (Columbia UP), (with Kevin B. Anderson) Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism (U of Chicago UP), and (with John Perry), Charand o Parand (Yale UP). Her latest research with Roger Friedland and Paolo Gardinali is a survey of Love, Marriage, and Religion in the Middle East and North Africa.

ALISON BRYSK is a Professor in the Global Studies Department at UC Santa Barbara. She holds a PhD in Political Science from Stanford University, and specializes in human rights, global governance, social movements, and gender relations. Professor Brysk has been a scholar and lecturer in Argentina, Australia, Ecuador, France, Spain, Germany, Sweden, the Netherlands, South Africa, and Japan—and has held Fulbright Fellowships in India and Canada. In 2013-2014, Brysk was a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C. Her books include The Politics of Human Rights in Argentina, From Tribal Village to Global Village, Human Rights and Private Wrongs, Global Good Samaritans, and most recently, Speaking Rights to Power.

MICHAEL CURTIN is a Professor of Film and Media Studies and Director of the Media Industries Project at UC Santa Barbara. Before joining UCSB, he was the Director of Global Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has also held teaching or research appointments at Northwestern University, Indiana University, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, the Institute of Ethnology at Academia Sinica, and the Center for the Humanities at Wesleyan University. His books include Playing to the World’s Biggest Audience: The Globalization of Chinese Film and TV and Reorienting Global Communication: Indian and Chinese Media Beyond Borders. He is currently at work on Media Capital: The Cultural Geography of Globalization and Precarious Creativity: Global Media, Local Labor. JAN

NEDERVEEN PIETERSE is a Professor of Global Studies and Sociology at UC Santa Barbara. He specializes in globalization, development studies and cultural studies. He currently focuses on trends in twenty-first century globalization. He is the author/editor of 22 books. He has been a visiting professor in Argentina, Brazil, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Netherlands, Pakistan, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Sweden, and Thailand. He edits book series with Routledge and Palgrave Macmillan and is associate editor of several journals.

DUNCAN MELLICHAMP is a founding member (1966-67) of the UCSB chemical engineering faculty, having begun his professional career as a research engineer with the Textile Fibers Department of the DuPont Company. He is well known for his extensive work in the field of process dynamics and control as author and co-author of over 100 research papers, monographs, and books. He is co-author of Process Dynamics and Control, a leading textbook now in its 3rd edition, used in chemical engineering departments worldwide. During his 37-year academic career he served in many faculty and administration positions of leadership, including elected chair of the Santa Barbara Division of the Academic Senate (1990-92), and chair/vice chair of the University of California Academic Council and faculty representative on the UC Board of Regents (1995-97). He has continued research and teaching in his department, pro bono, since formal retirement in 2003.

SUZANNE MELLICHAMP is a retired elementary schoolteacher, having taught regular and special education classes in Iowa, Indiana, North Carolina, and California. Her career spanned a period of nearly 30 years. In 1970 she earned an MA degree from UCSB (Graduate School of Education, with an emphasis in studio art). Since retirement, she has served as Docent for the Santa Barbara Museum of Art and on the boards of Santa Barbara Beautiful and the Wildling Art Museum in Los Olivos. She and Duncan have endowed a total of 13 chairs at UCSB, including three clusters of four each in Systems Biology/Bioengineering, Globalization, and Sustainability