Faculty

A native of County Donegal in the north of Ireland, Cathal Doherty is a Jesuit priest of the Irish province. Prior to joining the faculty at USF in the academic year 2015-16, he previously taught at Boston College and University College Dublin, Ireland. A linguist turned theologian, he completed doctoral degrees in theology (Boston College) and theoretical linguistics (University of California, Santa Cruz).

His main research interests lie in dogmatic, especially sacramental theology, in...

Jorge A. Aquino, PhD, is an associate professor in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies, specializing in Latin American and U.S. Latinx Christian theologies and religious history, liberation theologies, race and religion, sexuality, and the theo-politics of social movements. He is involved in research, conference work, and publishing activities throughout the Américas (see his academia.edu profile).

Dr. Aquino is a principal researcher in the Theology, Ethics, and Politics Working...

Professor Thomas Cavanaugh teaches medical ethics, a first-year seminar entitled What is Wisdom? (for which he received an NEH Enduring Questions grant), and, more recently, in the Honors College where he offers a course entitled Wisdom’s Lovers: Ancient and Medieval Philosophers. His most recently completed project concerns the Hippocratic Oath, which founds medicine as an exclusively therapeutic practice that especially excludes deliberately injuring patients. In 2018, Oxford University Press...

Lilian Dube is an associate professor and former chair of the Theology and Religious Studies Department at the University of San Francisco where she started in 2006 after a decade of teaching at universities in the USA and UK and the University of Zimbabwe, with tenure. In 1999, she made history as the first Black woman to earn a Doctor of Theology degree from Stellenbosch University.

She is the executive director of the film, USF in Zambia: HIV/AIDS and Social Justice, co-author of African...

Mark Miller is associate professor of systematic (philosophical) theology.  His mother came from the Philippines, his father from Maine, and they met in the middle as students at USF in the 1960s.  His specialty is human development and redemption, particularly our ongoing, communal conversion to greater knowledge, love, and service of God and all things.  His PhD dissertation is entitled, "Why the Passion?: Bernard Lonergan on the Cross as Communication." His undergraduate degree concentrated...

Vijaya Nagarajan is an associate professor in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies and in the Program of Environmental Studies. In addition to teaching at the University of San Francisco, she has also taught at the University of California, Berkeley and Harvard University.

Vijaya's academic interests weave among the fields of Hinduism, Environment, Gender, Ritual, and the Commons. She received her PhD in South Asian Language and Literatures from UC Berkeley. Vijaya has received...

The Rev. Vincent Pizzuto, PhD, is an Episcopal priest and Professor of New Testament and Christian Mysticism in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of San Francisco. He received his PhD (STD) in New Testament Exegesis from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium (2003).

Seeking to link ancient Christian tradition with contemporary faith, his core courses explore the relationship between historical-critical methods of exegesis and theological interpretations...