Faculty

Marilyn DeLaure is a professor of Environmental Studies and affiliate faculty of Advertising. She teaches courses on environmental communication, social movements, and consumer culture. Her research investigates how people effect social change, focusing especially on embodied performance and public memory. She has published essays on environmental activism, anti-consumption tactics, and civil rights rhetoric, and is co-editor of Culture Jamming: Activism and the Art of Cultural Resistance (NYU...

Professor Rachel Brahinsky teaches in the Urban and Public Affairs graduate program, the undergraduate Urban Studies program, and the Politics Department. She earned a PhD in geography from UC Berkeley, where she focused on the human and social geography of cities, with an emphasis on the politics of race and place. Her research and teaching center around the challenges of race and inequality in the context of rapidly changing American cities, with a longtime focus on the San Francisco Bay Area...

Dr. Dowd-Uribe is an interdisciplinary social scientist with core scholarly interests including sustainable agriculture, international development, food systems, climate adaptation, water security, and agroecology, with a principal geographic focus in Africa (Burkina Faso and Togo), and Latin America (Costa Rica and Colombia). He executes these interests through applied interdisciplinary research that seeks to understand the potential and actual social impacts of novel technologies and...

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...

David Silver is a professor of environmental studies and affiliate faculty of urban agriculture. He teaches classes on urban agriculture, hyper-local food systems, and food, culture, and storytelling. David recently published The Farm at Black Mountain College (Atelier Editions and Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center, 2024), the product of a decade's worth of original research. He serves as the faculty advisor of the USF Food Pantry and is one of the original founders, with Carol Spector...

Melinda Stone is an interdisciplinary artist who has been engaging in community-based projects for most of her life.

Stephen Zavestoski received his BA from the University of Notre Dame, and his MA and PhD from Washington State University.

He teaches courses in the area of Environmental Sociology. Dr. Zavestoski's research areas include environmental sociology, social movements, sociology of health and illness, and urban sustainability. He has published more than 40 articles and book chapters and co–edited Social Movements in Health (2005, Blackwell) and Contested Illnesses: Citizens, Science, and Health...

Kimberly Carfore is an adjunct professor of environmental studies and theology and religious studies. Her research interests include gendered experiences of divinity and embodied theology, nature spiritualities, ancestral skills, and wilderness experience.
 

Novella Carpenter is the author of Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer and The Essential Urban Farmer. She attended UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism, where she studied with Michael Pollan. She lives in Oakland where she runs GhostTown Farm, a 1/10 of an acre homestead with an orchard, honey bees, chickens, and lots of vegetables.

Sam Mickey is an adjunct professor in the Theology and Religious Studies department at the University of San Francisco. He has also taught at Dominican University of California, Pacifica Graduate Institute, and the California Institute of Integral Studies, and he has worked for the Forum on Religion and Ecology at Yale. His research and teaching interests include environmental ethics, religion and ecology, and integral ecology.