Faculty Members

Last name: A B  C  D  E  F  G  H  I  J  K  L  M  N  O  P  Q  R  S  T  U  V  W  X  Y  Z

Gul Agha

Professor, Department of Computer Science. Dr. Agha's research interests involve developing new abstractions for building open distributed systems and reasoning about their behavior. He is also involved in developing Sindhi Language instruction at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Irfan Ahmad

Associate Director, Center for Nanoscale Science and Technology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Dr. Ahmad is working at the confluence of bio- and nano technologies, with research and development of biosensors for agriculture and food applications using nanoscale technology. He also facilitates cross campus multidisciplinary research, industry and government linkages, and research fora.

Narendra Ahuja

Professor, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Dr. Ahuja's research interests include computer vision, robotics, image processing, and artificial intelligence.

Mir M. Ali

Professor, School of Architecture. Dr. Ali's research interests include tall buildings, earthquake-resistant design, structural system selection, structural-architectural integration, and flood-proof habitation. He is also involved in developing an architecture program in Bangladesh.

Imad L. Al-Qadi

Founder Professor of Engineering. Dr. Al-Qadi's has been a member of the faculty of the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department at the University of Illinois since August 2004. In addition, he is the Director of the Advanced Transportation Research and Engineering Lab (ATREL) and the Founding Director of the Illinois Center for Transportation. His research interests focus primarily on pavements including material characterization, design, analysis, assessment, modeling, and performance prediction.

Mary Arends-Kuenning

Associate Professor, Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics. Dr. Arends-Kuenning's research involves fertility and contraceptive use in developing countries, social learning, labor supply and returns to education in developing countries, and economics of the household.

Anustup Basu

Assistant Professor, Department of English and Cinema Studies.

Elabbas Benmamoun

Head and Professor, Department of Linguistics; Coordinator of Arabic Language Program. Dr. Benmamoun's research interests include comparative syntax with special emphasis on Arabic dialects, the language situation in the Arab world (its sociological, educational, political and cultural dimensions), and research on the representation and characterization of lexical relations within the lexical and morphological system of Arabic.

Bruce C. Berndt

Professor, Department of Mathematics. Dr. Berndt's areas of specialization are number theory, Ramanujan's notebooks, special functions, elliptic (especially Theta) functions, q-series, and continued fractions.

Rakesh Mohan Bhatt

Chair, Program in Second Language Acquisition and Teacher Education (SLATE); Associate Professor, Department of Linguistics and SLATE. Dr. Bhatt teaches courses in Sociolinguistics and South Asian Linguistics, supervises the Hindi program, and is a core faculty member of SLATE (Second Language Acquisition and Teacher Education). He received his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1994, and has taught at the University of Tennessee and at the University of South Carolina prior to coming to Illinois in Fall 2000. His main research interests are language contact, critical socioloinguistics, world Englishes, and Indo-Aryan syntax. Among his recent publications are: Verb Movement and the Syntax of Kashmiri (Kluwer, 1999), Optimal Expressions in Indian English (English Language and Linguistics, 2000), World Englishes (Annual Review of Anthropology, 2001), and Code-swtiching: Structural Models (Concise Encyclopedia of Socioloinguistics, Elsevier Science, to appear). He is currently finishing his co-authored book (with Rajend Mesthrie): World Englishes (under contract with Cambridge University Press).

Francis A. Boyle

Professor, College of Law. A scholar in the areas of international law and human rights, Dr. Boyle has written and lectured extensively in the United States and abroad on the relationship between international law and politics.

James Brennan

Assistant Professor, Department of History. Dr. Brennan's teaching and research interests focus on East Africa and the Indian Ocean world in the twentieth century, in particular on themes of urbanization, nationalism, political thought, and media. He is currently completing a book-length manuscript that examines the history of nationalist and racial thought in Tanzania through the lens of Dar es Salaam's colonial and post-colonial urban history. Dr. Brennan is also working on a book-length manuscript that reframes the political history of East Africa's decolonization from the perspective of the losing parties along the coast.

Douglas J. Brewer

Professor, Department of Anthropology; Director of Spurlock Museum. Dr. Brewer's research interests are faunal analysis, and Egyptian archaeology.

Donna A. Buchanan

Associate Professor, Division of Musicology, School of Music. A specialist in the musical styles of Bulgaria, the Balkans, and the CIS (especially Russia and the Republic of Georgia), Dr. Buchanan's scholarly interests include music as symbolic communication, music in aesthetic systems, music and power relations, music and cosmology, and music and social identity.

Matti Bunzl

Professor, Department of Anthropology. Dr. Bunzl specializes in anthropology and modern history of Europe, with particular research interests in Jewish culture, gender and sexuality, nationalism, ethnicity, and memory. Additional interests include the history and theory of anthropology, historical ethnography, and the intersection of history, literature, and culture. His recent publication "Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia: Hatreds Old and New in Europe" continues his research on anti-Islamic discourse in Europoe.

Antoinette Burton

Professor and Chair, Department of History; Bastian Professor of Global and Transnational Studies. Dr. Burton's was trained as a Victorianist and her work has focused on women, gender and empire in the context of modern Britain and colonial India. She has a longstanding interest in the history of imperial political culture and a developing interest in the challenges of world history.

Sahraoui Chaieb

Assistant Professor, Department of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics.

Arnab Chakraborty

Assistant Professor, Department of Urban and Regional Planning. Dr. Chakraborty's primary research areas include analysis of alternative development scenarios, impacts of land use policy, models of stakeholder involvement in regional planning processes and quantitative measures of urban form. Other interests include local government policies that influence land use, especially zoning; land resource management using GIS and planning for rural development.

Munir Cheryan

Professor, Food & Biochemical Engineering, Department of Food Science & Human Nutrition; Professor, Department of Agricultural and Biological Engineering. Dr. Cheryan's research interests include membrane technology; fermentation and bioprocessing; corn refining and processing; plant (vegetable) proteins; dairy technology.

Rajwant S. Chilana

South Asian Studies Librarian. Associate Professor in Library Administration.

Jennifer S. Cole

Associate Professor, Department of Linguistics. Dr. Cole's research interests lie in experimental and theoretical research that investigates the physical and cognitive bases of phonological systems. Other areas of interest include the linguistic structures of Indic languages, with a current special focus on Sindhi prosody, and computational models of phonological grammars and speech processing.

Noshir Contractor

Professor, Department of Speech Communication, Department of Psychology, and the Coordinated Science Laboratory. Dr. Contractor's research interests include the emergence (creation, maintenance, and dissolution) of communication and knowledge networks. Applications of complexity theory, chaos theory, and self-organizing systems theory to the study of organizing. Globalization and new forms of organizing. Computational modeling of organizational structures and processes. Advanced quantitative data analytic techniques including structural equation modeling, time series analysis, and network analysis.

Kenneth M. Cuno

Associate Professor, Department of History; Dr. Cuno's research interests include social, economic, and legal history of the modern Middle East.

Pradeep A. Dhillon

Associate Professor, Department of Educational Policy Studies. Dr. Dhillon's research interest is focused on India within the framework of critical theory.

Virginia Dominguez

Virginia Dominguez is the Edward William Gutgsell and Jane Marr Gutgsell Endowed Professor, Department of Anthropology. Much of her work has concerned how people and societies conceptualize sameness and difference both within and outside the units they consider their own-- how those things we often casually refer to as "ethnicity" or "identity" develop over time and across particular spaces, how they become discursively naturalized, systematized, and institutionally entrenched, and how and why they appear to change. She has undertaken extensive research on Israel , publishing People as Subject, People as Object: Selfhood and Peoplehood in Contemporary Israel (1989). She has also published From Neighbor to Stranger: The Dilemma of Caribbean Peoples in the United States (1975) and White By Definition: Social Classification in Creole Louisiana (1986). She is President-elect of the American Anthropological Association.

Rajib K. Doogar

Associate Professor, Department of Accountancy. Dr. Doogar's research interests are in managerial accounting, audit markets and more generally in applying economic theory and statistical methods to better understand accounting and auditing institutions and activity.

Hadi S. Esfahani

Professor, Department of Economics, and Director of the Center for South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies. Dr. Esfahani's research focuses on theoretical and empirical issues in the political economy of development; the role of country institutions in the formation and reform of fiscal, trade, and regulatory policies. He is a consultant to the World Bank on regulation in developing countries.

Muhammad al-Faruque

Associate Professor of Library Administration in the Asian Library and Middle Eastern Studies Librarian.

Colin Flint

Associate Professor, Department of Geography, and Director of ACDIS. Dr. Flint is a political geographer with interests in war and peace, terrorism, American hegemony, and the Arab world. He has edited two books on pressing contemporary issues; The Geography of War and Peace (Oxford University Press) and Spaces of Hate: Geographies of Discrimination and Intolerance in the U.S.A. (Routledge). He is currently working on two books: An Introduction to Geopolitics and the fifth edition of Political Geography: World-Economy, Nation-State and Locality (with Peter Taylor).

Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi

Assistant Professor, Department of History and Department of Sociology. Dr. Ghamari-Tabrizi studies social movements and intellectual articulations of Islamic conceptions of modernity. His teaching interests include transnational and global histories, contemporary histories of the Middle East, Islam and modernity, revolution, social theory, social movements, and politics and power.

Waïl S. Hassan

Associate Professor, Program in Comparative and World Literature. Dr. Hassan's most recent book is Tayeb Salih: Ideology and the Craft of Fiction (Syracuse, 2003).

Keith Hitchins

Professor, Department of History. Dr. Hitchins' research interests include Nationalism, Habsburg monarchy in the 18th & 19th centuries, Romanian and Hungarian history, Central Asia.

Valerie J. Hoffman

Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies, Department of Religion. Dr. Hoffman teaches courses on all aspects of Islam, from the Qur'an to medieval theology and philosophy, Sufism, local expressions of Islam throughout the Muslim world, modern politics, and women in Muslim societies. Her areas of research specialization include Sufism in modern Egypt, Islamic gender ideology, Muslim women's religious lives, Islamic scholarship in 19th- and early 20th-century Oman, the Hadramawt and Zanzibar, and contemporary Islamic movements.

Alfred Kagan

African Studies Bibliographer and Professor of Library Administration

Shiv Gopal Kapoor

Professor, Mechanical Science and Engineering; Grace Wicall Gauthier Chair; Director, the Center for Machine Tools Systems Research.

Jay P. Kesan

Professor and Director, Program in Intellectual Property and Technology Law. Dr. Kesan's interests include intellectual property, law and regulation of cyberspace, and science, technology and the law.

Fouad Abd El Khalick

Associate Professor, Department of Curriculum and Instruction.

Mohammad Khalil

Assistant Professor, Department of Religion. He specializes in Islamic thought and has presented papers at various national and international conferences, such as the 2nd World Congress of Middle East Studies, and annual meetings of the American Academy of Religion, the Middle East Studies Association, and the American Oriental Society. He has published/is publishing peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters on Islamic ethics (and bioethics); Western analyses of Islamic theology (particularly the anthropomorphism debate); conversion out of Islam; the hadith authenticity debates; the intersection of Islamic historiography, exegesis, and law; and the significance of the veil in Egypt, Turkey, and Iran. He is currently working on his first monograph on Muslim scholarly discussions on salvation and the fate of 'others.'

Madhu Khanna

Associate Professor, Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics. Dr. Khanna's research interests are technology adoption and policies to induce pollution prevention, welfare analysis of alternative policies for abatement of global warming, and economic incentives and environmental implications of business-led environmental management.

Tschangho John Kim

Endowed Professor, Department of Urban and Regional Planning. Dr. Kim's current research areas are combined land use-transportation modeling; impact analysis of earthquakes on transportation and regional economies; analyses of emission control for the transportation sector; economic analysis of transportation sector investment in Indonesia; planning for the city of Riyadh, Saudi Arabia; GIS applications to urban systems analysis; GIS standardization; impact analysis of information technology on urban form and structure; and intelligent transportation systems.

Susan Koshy

Associate Professor, Department of English and Asian American Studies

P. R. Kumar

Franklin W. Woeltge Professor and Professor, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Dr. Kumar's current research interests are in wireless networks, semiconductor wafer fab operations, learning, and financial economics.

Reed W. Larson

Professor, Human Development and Family Studies Program and Pampered Chef Endowed Chair in Family Resiliency. Dr. Larson's research interests include adolescents' experience in the after-school hours; youth activities; daily family dynamics of activity and emotion and adolescence in the 21st century.

Huseyin Leblebici

Professor and Head, Department of Business Administration, Organizational Behavior.

Frederic K. Lehman

Professor, Department of Anthropology, Department of Linguistics, and Program in Cognitive Science. Dr. Lehman's main research efforts are devoted to mathematical anthropology, cognitive science, and linguistics, as well as to the anthropology, linguistics, and history of Southeastern and South Asia. His major research has been on the peoples of the region from Easternmost India through Burma to Northwestern Thailand.

John A. Lynn

Professor, Department of History. Dr. Lynn's research interests include Absolutism and armies in France, 1600-1789; the formation of revolutionary armies, 1792-1796.

Alexander L. Mayer

Associate Professor, Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures and Department of Religion. Dr. Mayer's research interests include the history of medieval Chinese Buddhism and Sanskrit Buddhism.

Robert J. McKim

Professor, Department of Religion and Department of Philosophy; Director, Department of Religion. Dr. McKim's major research interests include philosophy of religion, history of early modern philosophy (especially Locke and Berkeley), and ethics.

Faranak Miraftab

Assistant Professor, Department of Urban and Regional Planning. Dr. Miraftab's work has focused on the access to housing by low-income groups, women, and immigrants in industrialized and developing countries, the role of NGOs and community-based groups in community development, and a range of issues critical to processes of development in the Third World.

Munir H. Nayfeh

Professor, Department of Physics. Dr. Nayfeh's research interests include atomic, molecular, and optical physics; and laser atomic spectroscopy.

Urvi Neelakantan

Assistant Professor, Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics.

Gerald Nelson

Professor, Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics. Dr. Nelson has two research projects underway: Economic spatial analysis and Economics of GMOs in agriculture.

David J. O'Brien

Associate Professor and Program Chair in School of Art & Design. David O'Brien studies nineteenth-century French artistic voyages in North Africa and the Middle East, and contemporary art from the same region.

Rajeshwari V. Pandharipande

Professor, Department of Linguistics, Sanskrit, and Comparative Literature. Dr. Pandharipande's research interests include sociolinguistics, Language of Religion, Syntax, Semantics, Literature of Hindi, Marathi, and Sanskrit, Sanskrit literary criticism, Asian mythology, History and theology of Hinduism, and Hinduism in diaspora.

Maryline Gisele Parca

Associate Professor, Department of Classics.

Wayne T. Pitard

Professor, Department of Religion. Dr. Pitard's primary areas of research are the history of ancient Syria and its political and cultural relationship with Israel; concepts of death and afterlife in ancient Syria-Palestine; and the production of a new image-based, digital edition of the ancient Canaanite texts from the city of Ugarit, Syria, entitled The Ugaritic Tablets Digital Edition

Winifred Poster

Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology. Dr. Poster's research interests are in gender, race, and class; work, occupations, and organizations; and globalization. She has done field work in Indian and American multinational companies to reveal how the social control of women varies cross-culturally. She is also examining how work-family balance issues diverge for women in these two countries, and how employers in multinational companies manipulate race, ethnicity, and gender differently in various cultural settings.

David Prochaska

Associate Professor, Department of History. Dr. Prochaska's research focuses on cultural, France, North Africa, comparative colonialism.

Panayiota Pyla

Assistant Professor, Design, School of Architecture. Dr. Pyla's research examines the interconnective discourses of modern architecture, environmentalism, and socioeconomic development, spanning the disciplines of architecture history, environmental history, and cultural studies.

Junaid Rana

Assistant professor, Asian American Studies and Department of Anthropology. Trained as a cultural anthropologist. Dr. Rana specializes in the study of South Asian diaspora, in particular Pakistani immigrants. His research and teaching interests include the study of race/racism, Islam and Muslims, and community organizing. He is currently completing a book manuscript entitled Terrifying Migrants: Race and the Muslim in South Asian Diaspora, that addresses the relationship of Islamophobia, global racial formations, and transnational migration.

Salim Rashid

Professor, Department of Economics. Dr. Rashid's research focuses on money, banking and economic development; religion and economics, especially applications to South and East Asia. He has served as a consultant to the Bangladesh Planning Commission.

Fazal Rizvi

Professor, Department of Educational Policy Studies. Dr. Rizvi is currently working on issues of identity, culture and the movement of students across national boundaries, focusing particularly on Indian students.  He is interested how international education transforms the identity of these students, and the ways in which they become attached to the Indian diasporas abroad.

Bruce Rosenstock

Associate Professor, Department of Religion and Coordinator of Computer-Assisted Instruction of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. Dr. Rosenstock's publications include: New Men: Converso Religiosity in the Fifteenth Century, a monograph dealing with the two most important converso Churchmen of 15th-century Spain, (forthcoming, spring 2003, Papers of the Medieval Hispanic Research Seminar, series ed. Alan Deyermond); Heresies and Orthodoxies: Regulating Identities in Late Antiquity, edited conference volume, in press review; and Laughter, Revelation, Exile: Studies in the Cultural Poetics of the Bible, in preparation.

D. Fairchild Ruggles

Associate Professor, Department of Landscape Architecture. Dr. Ruggles' research interests are the visual culture and built environment of the Islamic world.    She is the author of Gardens, Landscape, and Vision in the Palaces of Islamic Spain (2000) and in the same year produced the edited volume, Women, Patronage, and Self-Representation in Islamic Societies

Taher A. Saif

Associate Professor, Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering and Willett Faculty Scholar, College of Engineering.

Mahir Saul

Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology. Dr. Saul's research interests include precolonial and colonial West African political history, social organization, economic anthropology, the history of ideas and social theories, religion, particularly Islam and Catholic missionary activity, environmental history, the organization of West African small scale farming and markets. He also has a secondary regional interest in the Middle East.

Clifford E. Singer

Professor, Department of Nuclear Engineering. Dr. Singer's research interests include plutonium production and reprocessing in South Asia and arms control in India, Pakistan, and China.

Amita Sinha

Associate Professor, Department of Landscape Architecture. Dr. Sinha's research interests are in sacred landscapes, vernacular architecture, gardens, and historic and contemporary urban design. She is currently writing a book on sacred landscape of India.

Murugesu Sivapalan

Professor, Department of Geography.

Gale E. Summerfield

Associate Professor, Department of Human & Community Development and Director, Women and Gender in Global Perspectives. Dr. Summerfield's research interests include women, families and human security [health, housing, and income]; gender differences and social networks among immigrants in rural communities; and gender aspects of risks and rights associated with the process of globalization.

Marina Terkourafi

Assistant Professor of Linguistics. Dr. Terkourafi's research is in theoretical and experimental pragmatics and sociolinguistics, with an emphasis on varieties of Greek and the history and use of Cypriot Greek. She also has secondary interests in cognitive linguistics, language and emotions, and global hip-hop cultures.

Robert L Thompson

Professor, Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics and Gardner Chair in Agricultural Policy. Dr. Thompson's research interests include Agricultural policy, Agricultural trade policy and International competitiveness of Midwest Agriculture.

Maria N. Todorova

Professor, Department of History. Dr. Todorova specializes in the history of the Balkans in the modern period. She is the sole author or editor of over 15 books and is co-author/co-editor of La revolution industrielle dans le sud-est europeen - XIX s. Sofia: Institut d'etudes balkaniques, Musee national polytechnique, 1977 (co-editor, in English, French and German), and Rumeliiski delnitsi i praznitsi ot XVIII vek(Everyday life in Rumelia during the 18th century). Sofia: Otechestvan front, 1978 (co-author, in Bulgarian). She has contributed over 100 scholarly articles and book chapters.

Ronald E. Yates

Professor and Dean , Department of Journalism. Former award winning foreign correspondent, national correspondent, metropolitan editor, national editor and senior writer for Chicago Tribune. Dr. Yates teaches basic and advanced reporting, international reporting, and business reporting.

Yasemin Yildiz

Assistant Professor in Germanic Languages and Literatures. Research areas: 20th and 21st century German literature; literary multilingualism; minority literatures and cultures; migration, globalization, and transnational studies; feminist theory; Turkish migration to Germany, German-Jewish studies