Faculty

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...

Kathleen Coll is a cultural anthropologist whose research and teaching focuses on immigration politics and policies, cultural citizenship, and grassroots community organizing in the U.S., with special emphasis on the San Francisco Bay Area. Her books include Remaking Citizenship: Latina Immigrants and New American Politics (Stanford University Press, 2010) an ethnography of Mujeres Unidas y Activas and immigrant women’s activism in San Francisco, a co-authored book Disputing Citizenship (Policy...

Kouslaa Kessler-Mata (yak tityu tityu Chumash and Yokut) has taught at USF since 2007. She completed her BA in American Studies, with a minor in American Indian Studies, at San Francisco State University, and her PhD in Political Science from the University of Chicago. She is a graduate of the Institute for Recruitment of Teachers program at Phillips Academy and the Coro Fellows Program in Public Affairs in San Francisco. Her book, American Indians and the Trouble with Sovereignty (Cambridge...

Keally McBride is a professor of politics at the University of San Francisco and is interested in issues of power and social change. Her recent research has focused on the dynamics of information technology within contemporary capitalism, but she has published books on punishment and policing, movements of decolonization, and colonialism and the rule of law. She teaches a broad array of courses that investigate local public policy, European politics, political economy, peace and conflict, and...

Patrick Murphy is the Faculty Director for the Urban and Public Affairs program. Patrick is particularly interested in public budgets and tax policy, with an eye toward fairness and sustainability. As a policy researcher, he has led a number of different applied projects for organizations such as the RAND Corporation, the University of Washington, and the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC). He currently serves as the Director of Resource Equity and Public Finance for The Opportunity...

Jeffrey Paller specializes in African politics and sustainable urban development. His current research examines 1) the contentious politics of African urbanization, 2) the building of sustainable neighborhoods in African cities, and 3) political change and local governance in emerging cities. His first book Democracy in Ghana: Everyday Politics in Urban Africa (Cambridge University Press) was published in 2019. He also curates the weekly news bulletin “This Week in Africa.”

Tim Redmond has won more than 40 national and local awards in a four-decade career as an investigative and political reporter, much of that time at the San Francisco Bay Guardian. His work has also appeared in more than a dozen local and national publications. He teaches Journalism, Investigative Reporting, Political Reporting, and The Economics of Social Justice, among other courses. He has a second-degree black belt in Taekwondo.