2021 Awardees

Below are the UCSC faculty selected in fall 2021 for a Global Classrooms award. Awardees will work with their teaching partners at institutions abroad to learn how to re-design their UCSC courses as Global Classrooms, and deliver their Global Classroom courses in AY 2022-23.

Jin Zhang

Teaching partner: Dr. Tzarara López Luke, Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolás de Hidalgo (Mexico)

Global Classroom: Molecular Spectroscopy and Applications in Chemistry

Jin Zhang is a Distinguished Professor in Chemistry & Biochemistry at UC Santa Cruz.

Edith Leni

Teaching partner: Michelle Espinoza Lobos, Associate Professor, Department of Humanities, Universidad Arturo Prat, Iquique, Chile.

Global Classroom: Second-Year Spanish (SPAN 4)

Edith Leni is a lecturer in the Department of Languages and Applied Linguistics at UCSC. She teaches Spanish for Heritage Speakers (SPHS program) and all levels of Spanish as a second language. Edith holds a Ph.D. degree in Iberian and Latin American Cultures from Stanford University and an M.A. degree in Spanish from San Jose State University. Edith is a native of Santiago, Chile, and enjoys teaching and researching. Her cross-disciplinary research interests include the aftermath of political violence in Chile, narratives from concentration camps, and the representation of the Holocaust in Latin America.

Emily Murai

Teaching partner: Geoffrey Gathii, Lecturer, Cooperative University of Kenya (CUK)

Global Classroom: Academic Literacy and Ethos: Global and International Affairs (CLNI 1)

Emily Murai is a Lecturer at UC Santa Cruz, with affiliations in College Nine and the Environmental Studies department, and is a former Continuing Lecturer with the Writing Program. Her interests are in first-year composition (FYC), writing-across-the curriculum/writing-in-the-disciplines (WAC/WID), innovative pedagogy and curriculum design, diversity, equity and inclusion in higher education, and the humanistic/interpretive social sciences. She holds a PhD in Human Geography from the University of Minnesota, an MA in Sociology from the New School for Social Research, and is a UCSC alumna. She was a Peace Corps volunteer in rural Zambia from 2000-2002.

Rob Sean Wilson

Teaching partner: Dr. Serena Chou, Associate Research Fellow/Professor, Academia Sinica, Institute of European and American Studies (Taiwan)

Global Classroom: Pacific Rim Discourse (LIT 133F)

Rob Sean Wilson is a Western Connecticut native who was educated at the University of California at Berkeley, where he received a doctorate in English in 1976 and was founding editor of the Berkeley Poetry Review. He has taught in the English Department at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa (which proved formative to his own development as scholar and poet of Asia/Pacific becoming) and at Korea University in Seoul as a Fulbright Professor, and was twice a National Science Council visiting professor at National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan. In 2001, he became a professor of transnational/ post-colonial literatures at the University of California at Santa Cruz. In the summer of 2009, he team-taught a summer seminar (with Chadwick Allen) at National Sun Yat-sen University in Taiwan on Pacific Cultural Production, counter-conversion, and the ecological framework of "Oceania." He serves as Advisory Editor to the international journals Comparative American Studies, Cultural Studies, Boundary 2, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, and Cultural Studies. 

Mark Nash

Teaching partner: Angela Vettese, Director of the Graduate Program in Visual Arts, IUAV University of Venice

Global Classroom: Digital Arts & New Media (DANM 250F)

Mark Nash is a professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he founded the Isaac Julien Lab with his partner and long-time collaborator, Isaac Julien. A distinguished independent curator, film historian, and filmmaker with a specialization in contemporary fine art moving image practices, avant-garde, and world cinema, Nash holds a PhD from Middlesex University and an MA from Cambridge University. He has taught widely: in the Department of Film, Media and Cultural Studies at Birkbeck College, University of London; as a visiting lecturer at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in New York; at NYU in the Department of Cinema Studies; and at Harvard in the Department of Visual and Environmental Media and as a Visiting Scholar in Afro American Studies. He was Head of the Department for Curating Contemporary Art at the Royal College of Art in London where he developed the Inspire Program, a positive action MA pathway for curators from minority backgrounds for which he raised £3MGBP from public funds. As a curator, Nash collaborated regularly with the late Okwui Enwezor, including on Documenta11 and on The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa, 1945–1994, both in 2002, and most recently on ‘The Arena’ project at the Venice Biennial 2015.