Bertram, Carel - B.A. and M.A. Advisor and Undergraduate Coordinator

Birt, Rodger - Faculty Early Retirement Program

Chandler, Arthur - Faculty Early Retirement Program

Jacobowitz, Seth - Humanities B.A. and M.A. Advisor

Leonard, George - Humanities B.A. and M.A. Advisor

Laura Garcia-Moreno - B.A. and M.A. Advisor

Luft, Sandra - B.A. and M.A. Advisor

Ruotolo, Cristina - Humanities B.A. and M.A. Advisor and American Studies Coordinator

Sammons, Richard - Publications Chair, California Humanities Association

Scott, Mary - B.A. and M.A. Advisor and Graduate Coordinator

Shobhi, Prithvi - B.A. and M.A. Advisor

Steier, Saul - Department Chair; Humanities B.A. and M.A. Advisor; General Education; Liberal Studies Area IV

Carel Bertram - B.A. and M.A. Advisor and Undergraduate Coordinator
Office: HUM 325
Office Hours: Please e-mail for current office hours
Phone: 338-3125
Email: carel@sfsu.edu

Dr. Carel Bertram joins the SFSU Humanities Department with a background in Islamic Culture. She received her Ph.D. in Art History from UCLA (1998) on the art and architectural history of the pre modern and early modern middle East, with a focus on Ottoman Turkey and Ottoman Bosnia. Arriving from the Department of Art History and the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at The University of Texas at Austin, she brings courses not only on the varieties of visual culture of Islam, but on the interaction between the historical mixture of cultures in the Middle East. Thus, her courses will compare the book and book making traditions among Christians and Muslims in the late Byzantine world, including their holy scriptures and their shared stories about the afterlife, which they depict and describe in hauntingly similar ways. She will also introduce shared and diverse ways of interpreting sacred spaces, including places of prayer, but also shrines and the sacred aspects of cities and even individual houses. In fact, Dr. Bertram's particular interest is in the poetics of spaces, that is, how spaces are not only built but felt. The subject of her doctoral dissertation was about how Ottoman and Turkish Houses became objects of Memory, carrying personal and political meanings through periods of radical change. Because of her interest in the affective meanings of spaces, her courses and her research use both visual and textual analyses, with real buildings and real places as well as the novels, poetry, and memoirs about them, as her data.

Rodger Birt -Faculty Early Retirement Program

Professor Rodger Birt's primary research field is the history of photography in the United States since 1840 with an emphasis on the period of 1840-1950. I am interested in American photography and photographers as their work relates to the larger social, political, and cultural context. I have published works on the Harlem photographer of the earlier twentieth century, James VanDerZee, and the San Francisco architectural photographs from the 1850's made by George Robinson Fardon. I am currently working on photographs of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. My teaching interests are American art and photography, the history of American architecture, and the place of ancient Roman and Greek societies in the study of America. Professor Birt recently entered the Faculty Early Retirement Program.

Arthur Chandler - Faculty Early Retirement Program

Professor Arthur Chandler's current areas of research and teaching include:

1. Digital culture and design- the social, philosophical, and aesthetic dimensions of internet culture
2. The cultural histories of San Francisco, Paris, and Vienna
3. International Expositions (world's fairs)
4. The literature, art, music, and dance of Western culture

Professor Chandler recently entered the Faculty Early Retirement Program.

George Leonard - Humanities B.A. and M.A. Advisor

Office: HUM 530
Office Hours: Please e-mail for current office hours 
Phone: 338-7428
Website: http://www.georgeleonard.com

Professor George Leonard's seminars teach writing for publication. Even if you finally decide you're not interested in writing professionally, working "backstage" in writing for a semester will change and enrich the way you read forever. The American Library Association designated two of his books, "One of the Outstanding Academic Books of the Year." They include Into the Light of Things: The Art of the Commonplace from Wordsworth to John Cage (University of Chicago Press), The Ice Cathedral (novel, Simon and Schuster), Beyond Control (novel, Macmillan), and their screenplays (Ken Schur/Ron Howard/Imagine Entertainment/Universal Pictures). He edited and was chief contributor to The Asian Pacific American Heritage: A Companion to Literature and Arts, and The Italian American Heritage. He was for fifteen years the editor of the College of Humanities Faculty MAGAZINE.

Seth Jacobowitz - B.A. and M.A. Advisor

Office: HUM 531
Office Hours: Please e-mail for current office hours 
Phone: 338-1169
Email: sjacob@sfsu.edu

Seth Jacobowitz is a specialist in Japanese literature, thought and visual culture from the late Tokugawa period to the contemporary. He recently completed The Edogawa Rampo Reader, an anthology of short stories and essays in English translation by Japan’s most acclaimed writer of mystery and detective fiction, forthcoming soon by Kurodahan Press (http://www.kurodahan.com/e/ catalog/titles/j0020.html). His current research for a book entitled Writing Technology in Meiji Japan examines how new techniques of recording in the late nineteenth century such as photography and phonography decisively shaped modern Japanese language, literature and national subjectivity. His next major project will be a study of modernist literary and artistic cross-currents between Japan and Brazil in the early twentieth century.

Teaching interests include premodern and modern Japanese culture, media theory, the history of sexuality, the megalopolis of Tokyo, anime and the posthuman horizon, Japonisme and European modernism, and the “spectre” of comparative modernities.

Sandra Luft - B.A. and M.A. Advisor

Office: HUM 439
Office Hours: Please e-mail for current office hours
Phone: 338-2165
Email: srluft@sfsu.edu
Website: http://online.sfsu.edu/~srluft/

Professor Sandra Luft's teaching and research interests center on the modern European (sixteenth to twentieth centuries) history of ideas, with an emphasis on the theoretical and methodological assumptions of the interdisciplinary study of cultural history. For many years the focus of her research has been the eighteenth century Neapolitan philosopher Giambattista Vico, who, reacting against the modern rationalist-scientific conception of knowledge, delimited knowledge to what humans had made, their own historical-cultural world. Her book, Vico's Uncanny Humanism: Reading the "New Science" between Modern and Postmodern, was published by Cornell University Press, 2003. Recently, her teaching has focused on contemporary postmodern literature, particularly the works of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida, as well as the writings of Hannah Arendt.

Cristina Ruotolo - Humanities B.A. and M.A. Advisor and American Studies Coordinator

Office: HUM 336
Office Hours: Please e-mail for current office hours
Phone: 338-3127
Email: ruotolo@sfsu.edu

Professor Cristina Ruotolo's areas of scholarly and teaching interest include:

• Late nineteenth and twentieth-century American literature, music cultural studies. (Focus of current research: turn-of-the-century American music and literature)
• African-American literature, music, art
• European and American modernism
• American autobiography
• Modern African and Caribbean literature
• Strong background in British literature (particularly Shakespeare, Jane Austen, George Eliot, modernists).

Richard Sammons - Publications Chair, California Humanities Association

Office: HUM 242
Office Hours: Please e-mail for current office hours
Phone: 338-3092
Email: rsammons@sfsu.edu

Mary Scott - B.A. and M.A. Advisor and Graduate Coordinator

Office: HUM 438
Office Hours: Please e-mail for current office hours 
Phone: 338-7425
Email: mscott@sfsu.edu

Professor Mary Scott's primary area of scholarly interest is China, particularly the history, literature, and visual arts of the Ming(1368-1664), Qing(1644-1911) and Republican(1911-1949) periods. Her early work was about the late seventeenth-century emergence of a fiction of social critique disguised as a chronicle of domestic life, a development that culminated in the great eighteenth-century novel Dream of the Red Chamber. In recent years her scholarly and teaching interests have centered on the uses of the past in modern China. Her current work examines conceptions archaeology, museums and book collecting. She is also working on a translation of a novel about female impersonators in the nineteenth-century Beijing theater. Her teaching interests include Japanese history, literature and art, the history of science and technology in East Asia, and the history and ideology of landscape design in East Asia and Europe.

Prithvi Datta Chandra Shobhi - B.A. and M.A. Advisor

Office: HUM 529
Office Hours: Please e-mail for current office hours 
Phone: 338-1220
Email: pdcs@sfsu.edu

Prithvi Datta Chandra Shobhi specializes in medieval South India, (especially Kannada literature and cinema) and the cultural politics of contemporary South Asia. His primary intellectual interest is in the history of dissent and dissenting cultures, particularly pre-modern critiques of Indian society and their continuing relevance in the cultural politics of modern South Asia. His doctoral work at the University of Chicago focused on a pre-modern utopian social-liteary movement and its appropriation by a modern community (Virasaiva-Lingayat). Recently, Prof. Shobhi has also begun writing on the films of Dr. Rajkumar, which he hopes will result in a monograph entitled 'Why Should I be Good? Moral Visions in the Films of Dr. Rajkumar'.

At San Francisco State University, Prof. Shobhi teaches courses on South Asian Civilization, the city of Delhi, Untouchability and Racism, Comparative Colonialism and Images of Everyday Life. His graduate seminar courses focus on themes such as vernacular Humanism and Ideas of Civilization.

Saul Steier - Department Chair; Humanities B.A. and M.A. Advisor; General Education; Liberal Studies Area IV

Office: HUM 440
Office Hours: Please e-mail for current office hours.
Phone: 338-3129
Email: sauls@sfsu.edu

Professor Saul Steier: stylish Bon vivant who speaks slowly and never raises his voice. Special interests: African Culture, Pacific Island Cultures, theory, Cultural Studies, American Ethnic Literature, Sci-Fi, murder mysteries, dirty books and pictures, Contemporary Cultures, film, theater, modernism, post-modernism, Post Colonial Studies, Francophone Culture, Urban Humanities, and garage sales.