Category: Profiles

Lisa K. Childress Profile

Profiles

Lisa K. Childress is a global education consultant, working with universities to engage faculty in international teaching, research, and service.

Dr. Childress previously worked at the University of Virginia’s Darden Graduate School of Business as the international career consultant, where she taught cross-cultural training seminars for faculty and MBA students, co-chaired the Dean’s International Advisory Board, taught a professional development course, and counseled domestic students on their job search overseas and international students on their job search in the U.S. Dr. Childress also served as Duke University School of Law’s director of special international projects, where she created programs to build bridges between international and U.S. students and developed Duke Law programs overseas, such as the Asia-American Institute of Transnational Law in Kyushu, Japan. Dr. Childress holds degrees from the University of Virginia, Harvard University, and George Washington University.

Selected publications:

Childress, L.K. (2018). The twenty-first century university: Developing faculty engagement in internationalization (2nd ed.). New York: Peter Lang.

Childress, L. K. (2017). The role of academic departments in promoting faculty engagement in internationalisation. Internationalisation of Higher Education, 1, 15-34.

Childress, L. K. (2012). The faculty role in internationalizing the curriculum: Findings from a cross-case study. In D. K. Deardorff, H. de Wit, & T. Adams (Eds.), The Sage handbook of international higher education (pp. 257-259). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Childress, L. K. (2010). Interdisciplinarity: A catalyst for faculty engagement win internationalization. Journal of Global Initiatives: Policy, Pedagogy, Perspective, 4(1), Article 5.

Childress, L. K. (2009). Internationalization plans for higher education institutions. Journal of studies in international education, 13(3), 289-309.

Childress, L. K. (2009). Planning for internationalization by investing in faculty. Journal of International & Global Studies, 1(1), 30-49.

Work for CID:
Lisa Childress wrote the guest post Increasing Faculty Engagement in Intercultural Communication and Internationalization on Campus.

Tasha Souza Profile

ProfilesTasha Souza is the Associate Director for the Center for Teaching and Learning and Professor of Communication at Boise State University.

Tasha Souza

Most recently, she was the Faculty Associate for Inclusive Excellence for Humboldt State University and a Fulbright scholar at the University of the West Indies in Barbados. Previously, she was the founding Faculty Development Coordinator for HSU’s Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching (CELT) and also served as an Instructional Consultant at the Center for Instructional Development and Research (CIDR) at the University of Washington. She has published in the areas of difficult dialogues in the classroom, addressing microaggressions with microresistance, service-learning pedagogy, discussion-based teaching, multicultural education, instructional communication, and intercultural conflict. Her current research is on difficult dialogues, participation, and stereotype threat in the college classroom.

Dr. Souza teaches and consults. She has taught a variety of courses in communication, women’s studies, and business and has taught in 5 different countries. She is a consultant on communication and pedagogy broadly and has provided workshops and/or consultation services at over 20 institutions of higher education in the U.S. and abroad. She has also consulted outside of higher education with organizations such as the Yurok Tribe, Johnson Wax, Girls Inc., M & M/Mars, First 5, Clorox, Promotions Unlimited, Seattle Department of Public Health, San Jose Recreation and Leisure Department and United Indian Health Services.

Key publications:

Barnes, E., & Souza, T. J. (2019, January 30). Intercultural dialogue partners: Creating space for difference and dialogue. Faculty Focus.

Souza, T.J., & Exah, A. (2018). Preparing program directors for managing student conflict and microaggressions abroad. Diversity Abroad’s Faculty Development Short Course.

Souza, T. J. (2018, April 30). Responding to microaggressions in the classroom: Taking ACTION. Faculty Focus.

Ganote, C. M., Cheung, F., & Souza, T.J. (2016). Responding to microaggressions with microresistance: A framework for consideration. In A. T. Harrell (Ed)., POD Diversity Committee White Paper at the 41st Annual POD Conference (pp. 3-7).

Souza, T.J. (2016). Managing hot moments in the classroom: Concrete strategies for cooling down tension. In Faculty Focus special report: Diversity and inclusion in the college classroom.

Souza, T., Vizenor, N., Sherlip, D., & Raser, L. (2016). Transforming conflict in the classroom: Best practices for facilitating difficult dialogues and creating an inclusive communication climate. In P. M. Kellett & T. G. Matyok (Eds.), Transforming conflict through communication: Personal to working relationships. (pp. 373-395). Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.

Souza, T.J. (2007).  Creating social justice in the classroom:  Preparing students for diversity through service-learning. In J. Calderon (Ed.), Race, poverty, and social justice: Multidisciplinary perspectives on enduring societal issues, (pp. 187-206).  Sterling, VA:  Stylus Publishing.

Souza, T.J. (2003).  Framing equity: Approaches to diversity in the classroom. In S.E. Lucas (Ed.), Selections from the Speech Communication Teacher. Boston, MA: McGraw Hill.

Souza, T.J.  (1996).  Intercultural conflict management. Multicultural Education Journal, 4(2), 4-10.

Work for CID:
Tasha Souza wrote Constructing Intercultural Dialogues #11: Creating Connection Through ICD Partners.

Ruben Mazzei Profile

ProfilesRuben Daniel Mazzei is a university EFL and literature teacher and a sworn translator (Universidad Nacional de La Plata) and is currently working on his thesis in Linguistics. He teaches at primary, secondary, tertiary and university levels, and is a researcher for University of Buenos Aires.

Ruben Mazzei

He has delivered and produced CPD courses and materials since 2005 for Dirección de Formación Continua -Province of Buenos Aires- and has coordinated the team of CPD teachers for the Ministry of Education for nine years.

He has recently participated in the updating of the Curriculum Design for English in Primary School for the Ministry of Education and for Secondary School (E.S.B.) He is also a speaking examiner for Cambridge University. He has participated in several of the British Council activities such as developing material, facilitating reading groups and coordinating the Connecting Classrooms programme for Argentina. He has facilitated workshops for the British Council on Global Citizenship and Global Education accredited by the University of London and workshops for the British Council Core Skills Programme both in Argentina and abroad.

He is also an adjunct professor at the University of Buenos Aires –College of Pscychology- where he coordinates and designs materials for E.A.P reading courses and academic literacies. At initial teacher education (profesorado de inglés) he teaches World Literature with a strong connection to intercultural competence/awareness, identity, otherness, and language as a resource to convey meanings and cultures.

Ruben Mazzei´s research interests are interculturality (also as part of the international projects he coordinates at primary and secondary school), academic literacies, genre-based pedagogy- including multimodality- and didactics in Higher Education.

Some of his publications can be found on his Academia.edu page.

Work for CID:
Ruben Mazzei translated KC11: Intercultural Discourse and Communication, and KC44: Multimodality into Spanish. He has also served as a judge for the 2019 CID Video Competition.

István Fekete Profile

ProfilesIstván Fekete did his postdoctoral training in psycholinguistics at the University of Oldenburg, Germany, where he worked also as a consultant in statistics and research methods.

István Fekete

Previously, he was a research fellow at the Research Institute for Linguistics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and earlier a research assistant at the Department of Cognitive Science of the Budapest University of Technology and Economics, where he received his PhD in psycholinguistics in 2013. He earned his M.A. degrees in English and German language and literature from Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest in 2006.

His research focuses on psycholinguistics, cognitive linguistics, semantics and pragmatics, the understanding of exhaustivity in wh-phrases, and isolating language disorder using machine-learning approaches. His wider research interests include interdisciplinary work and the application of advanced statistical methods to linguistic data. He has worked with EEG, eye-tracking and behavioral methods.

For publications, please see
https://loop.frontiersin.org/people/491179/overview

Alina Timofte Profile

ProfilesAlina Timofte is currently a Lecturer for Transferable Skills at the University of Konstanz, Germany. Her teaching and research interests cluster around three themes: a) 21st-century skills (global citizenship, intercultural communication, and critical thinking), b) service learning, and c) academic writing.

Alina TimofteShe is also a practicing GlobeSmart Profile℠ certified consultant, utilizing the GlobeSmart Profile, a statistically validated cultural intelligence software developed by Aperian Global, mostly in academic contexts (as in her seminar “Globally Competent Citizens: Communicating Across Cultures”). Previously, she was a Research Fellow at the Center of Excellence “Cultural Foundations of Social Integration” at the University of Konstanz. The main activities within this academic position were working on a literary science project focusing on Austrian literature after 1945, as well as writing and publishing research articles in peer-reviewed journals.

She holds a Master of Arts with honours in German Studies, with cultural theory, sociology, multilingualism, and translation studies as additional fields. In 2009, she received the Alumni Award for Excellence “Best Exam Achievement by a Graduate Student of Literature” at the University of Konstanz. Her Master’s thesis dealt with the solitude vs. sociability debate in connection with cultural criticism in the European literary anthropology of the 18th century, with a special emphasis on contributions by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, J. G. Zimmermann, and Immanuel Kant.

Following her Bachelor’s in German Studies and Classical Philology at the University “Alexandru Ioan Cuza,” Alina worked as a Cultural Program Coordinator at the Goethe-Zentrum associated with Goethe-Institut in Iasi, Romania.

Alina has a track record of research, teaching, and curriculum design in cultural studies, intercultural communication, and literary criticism. Her work and study has been supported by grants from the German Research Foundation (DFG), German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), as well as from the Herbert-Quandt-Foundation (Humanities Fellowship), among others.

Her research articles, reviews, and translations have appeared in Limbus. Australian Yearbook of German Literary and Cultural Studies, IASL: International Archives for Social History of the German Literature, Recherches Germaniques, Literaturkritik as well as in other journals and volumes.

On a more personal note, Alina lives with her German-Romanian-Senegalese family in the picturesque city of Konstanz, where they are jointly navigating the complex waters of living multilingually and multiculturally. She sees herself as an educator and a life-long learner at heart, and a world citizen in the making.

Work for CID:

Alina Timofte has translated KC5: Intercultural Communication, KC12: Third Culture Kids, KC22: Cultural Identity, KC49: Intersectionality, KC55: Stereotypes, and KC93: Transnationalism into German, and KC22: Cultural Identity into Romanian. She has also served as a reviewer for German.

Stacey K. Sowards Profile

ProfilesDr. Stacey K. Sowards (PhD, Kansas University) is Department Chair and Professor of Communication at the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP), where she has been since 2004.

Stacey K. SowardsHer research interests include the intersections of: rhetorical theory and criticism, feminist theories of communication, environmental communication and rhetoric, and intercultural communication and rhetoric. She is especially interested in these areas of inquiries in Asia and Latin America. She has completed research projects in and about Indonesia, Mexico, and Costa Rica.

Her publications appear in Communication Theory, Philosophy and Rhetoric, Communication Studies, The Howard Journal of Communications, Hypatia, Argumentation and Advocacy, Ethics and the Environment, The Globalization of Corporate Media Hegemony, and other outlets. She also received a William J. Fulbright research grant for her dissertation research in 2000-2001 and a Fulbright-Hays grant in 2005. While at UTEP, Dr. Sowards has led study abroad programs/research trips in Mexico, Costa Rica, Indonesia, and Germany. She also serves as the department’s coordinator for UTEP’s master’s program with the non-governmental organization, Rare. Rare is based in Arlington, Virginia, and works to protect endangered species and their habitats in more than 40 countries. Dr. Sowards also worked with the Rare-UTEP training program for conservation campaigns at the Bogor Agricultural Institute in Indonesia and the Universidad Libre in Colombia with students/campaign managers who earn their M.A. degrees from the Department of Communication.

Work for CID:
Stacey Sowards described her Fulbright experience.

Eleftherios Margaritis Profile

ProfilesEleftherios Margaritis was born in Athens, Greece, but he comes from the island of Lesvos. He has an MA in European Societies & European Integration from the Department of Sociology at the University of Aegean (2018), and a BA in Philosophy & Education from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (2014).

Eleftherios MargaritisHe attended the Padagogische Hochschule Freiburg (Germany) as part in the Erasmus exchange program, where he experienced first-hand the potential of intercultural communication. Later he finished his obligatory military service in Greece with distinction by helping register migrants in 2015, where he experienced the difficulty of intercultural communication with traumatized people. Later, even while working as a manager for Enterprise Car Rental, he continued helping by contributing to research projects like View(points) storytelling project, and by cooperating with UNHCR for the transfer of the vulnerable. The situation on his island makes him feel sad and happy at the same time: sad because of the tragic journey of these traumatized people, yet happy he has had the opportunity to help them in person.

As an undergraduate, he majored in Education, learning multicultural/intercultural content. His Master’s thesis was about migration, specifically intercultural education in Greece and its European dimension. Currently he attends two seminars, one through the University of Thessaly on the Teaching of Greek as a Foreign Language, and another through the Kapodistrian University of Athens on Inclusive Education. He now lives in Norrkoping, Sweden, where he is considering pursuing a PhD at Linkoping University through the Department of Ethnic and Migration Studies.

Work for CID:
Eleftherios Margaritis translated KC55: Stereotypes into Greek, together with Anastasia Karakitsou.

Lûiz Fêrnando da Silva Profile

ProfilesLûiz Fêrnando da Silva is an experienced Brazilian specialist in the TV market, and a lecturer.  He is a TV market enthusiast with a professional and personal interest in content marketing, brand content, content strategy, windowing, streaming, content for social media, TV market regulation and laws, customer and audience insights, content trends, technologies for production and consumption of content and innovation in general.

Lûiz Fêrnando da Silva

Over the last years, he has worked for Globo TV, the biggest media group in Brazil and taught for Escola Superior de Propaganda (ESPM) e Marketing and Agência Nacional de Cinema, the latter being the main public investor on TV production in Brazil.

At Globo TV, he built experience with TV shows creation, development, production planning and programming for free and pay TV (Globo TV & Globosat), streaming services (GloboPlay & GlobosatPlay) and TV on demand (available through NET and SKY). During the years working as a researcher for Globo TV, he attended a variety of conferences – SXSW, TED, Mipcom, MipTV, L.A. Screenings and Natpe, to look for insights and trends to support creation, development and programming decisions. He became familiar with FremantleMedia Formats, and had the opportunity to visit some company displays at Mipcom and Natpe Miami.

As a researcher, his area of study is the Political Economy of Communication and Cultural Studies, with a specific interest in the investigation of national and international broadcasting systems and the way the Internet (streaming: VOD, SVOD, TVOD) imposes new regulatory and marketing challenges on local, regional, national, continental, and global levels. In addition, he has interests in subjects such as multiculturalism, gender, and race, and how they are being represented through media culture products.

Currently he is conducting a post-doctoral study entitled “Globo and Netflix: unfolding of the coexistence between the services of SVOD in Brazil.” In this investigation the goal is understanding how Netflix causes changes in the country’s two largest broadcasting companies, TV Globo (open TV) and Globosat (cable channel programmer), both owned by Grupo Globo. The research is being conducted at the Center for Communication and Society Studies (CECS), Minho University, in Braga, Portugal.

Work for CID:
Lûiz Fêrnando da Silva translated KC3: Intercultural Competence and KC22: Cultural Identity into Portuguese. He has also served as a reviewer for Portuguese.

Mine Krause Profile

ProfilesMine Krause graduated with a double Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the Universities of Bayreuth (Germany) and Pau (France) in 2009. Her doctoral thesis on scandal and angst in the works of Albee, Pinter, Ionesco, and Genet was published in 2010 by Peter Lang. She has worked as an assistant in the Literature and Linguistics departments of Bayreuth, Ankara, and Granada.

Mine KrauseBeing of Turkish-German origin, she has developed a particular research interest in cross-cultural studies with a focus on intercultural identity. Her first article in this field appeared in the Journal of Turkish Literature and dealt with the culinary language of Elif Shafak’s novel Baba ve Piç. Mine Krause has a blog about Turkish Literature and has interviewed a number of writers for the Turkish literary magazine Artful Living, among them Sema Kaygusuz, Ece Temelkuran, Mehmet Eroğlu and Latife Tekin. Since 2013, she has been a member of a research cluster on Interculturality and Literature at the Universities of Bayreuth and Shanghai.

An interview with her on the concept of interculturality in the context of a joint Ph.D. can be found here.

Selected Publications:

Krause, M. (2025). Multiple identities in the novels of Charmaine Wilkerson, Zadie Smith and Elif Shafak. In A. N. Éigeartaigh (Ed.), Collaboration, exchange and transformation in literary and cultural practices: Intercultural conversations (pp. 115-134). Cambridge Scholars.

Krause, M., Sun, Y., & Steppat, M. (2023). Punishing transgression in honor culture and face culture. Peter Lang.

Krause, M. (2021). The value of honor in the context of immigration: Elif Shafak’s Honour. In M. Steppat & Kulich (Eds.), Literature and interculturality (2): Valuations, identifications, dialogues (pp. 219-246). Shanghai, China: Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press.

Krause, M., & Sun, Y. (2021). Cultures of honor, cultures of face: Literary representations of gendered values. In M. Steppat & Kulich (Eds.), Literature and Interculturality (2): Valuations, Identifications, Dialogues (pp. 33-102). Shanghai, China: Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press.

Krause, M., & Steppat, M. (2021). Values and valuations: Lines of inquiry. In M. Steppat & Kulich (Eds.), Literature and Interculturality (3): From Cultural Junctions to Globalization (pp. 343-373). Shanghai, China: Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press.

Krause, M., Sun, Y., & Steppat, M. (2020). Honor, face, and violence: Cross-cultural literary representations of honor cultures and face cultures. Berlin, Germany: Peter Lang.

Krause, M. (2018). Tasting interculturality: Culinary visions of America in Elif Shafak’s The Bastard of Istanbul. In M. Steppat & S. Kulich (Eds.), Literature and interculturality (1): Concepts, applications, interactions (pp. 243-266). Shanghai, China: Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press.

Krause, M. (2018). From separating to uniting hyphen: Hyphenated identities in Gish Jen’s and Elif Shafak’s novels. In M. Steppat & S. Kulich (Eds.), Literature and interculturality (1): Concepts, applications, interactions (pp. 207-242). Shanghai, China: Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press.

Krause, M., & Shen, W. (2018). Intercultural concepts of identity. In M. Steppat & S. Kulich (Eds.), Literature and interculturality (1): Concepts, applications, interactions (pp. 425-448). Shanghai, China: Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press.

Krause, M. (2017). Screaming silence of female characters in Ayfer Tunç’s novel Dünya Ağrısı. Monograf Journal, 7, 159-178.

Work for CID:

Mine Krause has written a guest post, Sharing an exotic meal as a trigger of intercultural dialogue. She has also served as a reviewer for German translations.

Fatemeh Hippler (Kamali-Chirani) Profile

ProfilesFatemeh Hippler (birth name: Kamali-Chirani) is currently a research associate at the Hannah Arendt Institute for Research on Totalitarianism (HAIT), TU Dresden (Dresden University of Technology), in Germany.

Fatemeh Kamali-Chirani

She received her BA (in Journalism) and her MA (in North American Studies) from Tehran University, Iran, where she was a journalist and NGO activist.

Fatemeh completed her PhD (2012-2018) at the University of Augsburg in Germany with a scholarship from Brot für die Welt (Bread for the World) on the subject of intercultural dialogue between Western and Muslim countries. From 2020 until January 2022, Fatemeh worked in Pakistan as a Visiting Research Fellow at SDPI (a development organization) and was a Visiting Faculty Member at Quaid-e-Azam University, Islamabad.

Her publications are in the areas of intercultural dialogue, foreign cultural policy, sustainable development, migrants and refugees (especially Afghans) in Germany and Pakistan.

She is currently working on the project “Women who migrated from, to and within Germany,” focusing on acculturation of Afghan women in Germany, as a researcher at HAIT, TU Dresden (Dresden University of Technology).

For further details, see her LinkedIn profile.

Selected publications:

In English

Kamali-Chirani, F. (2019). Review of Afiya S. Zia’s  Faith and feminism in Pakistan: Religious agency or secular autonomy? Digest of Middle East Studies, pp. 1-4. https://doi.org/10.1111/dome.12192

Kamali-Chirani, F. (2019). Does intercultural dialogue matter? The role of intercultural dialogue in the foreign cultural policy of Iran and Germany. Münster, Germany: Lit Verlag.

Kamali-Chirani, F. (2019). Review of Mohammad Zaman’s Islam in Pakistan: A history. Digest of Middle East Studies, 28(1),  1-5.

Hippler, J., & Kamali-Chirani, F. (2018). Cultural civil war. In European Union National Institutes for Culture, Culture Report: EUNIC Yearbook 2017/2018 (pp. 36-41). Stuttgart, Germany:  European Union National Institutes for Culture.

Kamali Chirani, F. (2018). Review of Baumgartner and Towner’s The Internet and the 2016 presidential campaign. International Journal of Communication, 12, 2940–2943.

Kamali Chirani, F. (2018). Review of Miriam Müller’s A spectre is haunting Arabia: How the Germans brought their communism to Yemen. Middle East Media and Reviews, 6(3).

Kamali Chirani, F. (2018) Review of Yadullah Shahibzadeh’s The Iranian political language: From the late nineteenth century to the present. Digest of Middle East Studies, 27(1), 157-160.

Kamali Chirani, F. (2017). Incapability of institutional structures as an obstacle for the intercultural dialogue between Iran and Germany. In O. Ernst (Ed.), Iran-Reader 2017 (pp. 109-111). Sankt Augustin/Berlin: Konrad-Adenauer Stiftung.

In German

Kamali Chirani, F. (2013). Dialog unter staatlicher Aufsicht [Dialogue under state supervision]. Welt-Sichten Journal, 6, 46-47.

In Farsi

Kamali Chirani, F. (2018). Potānsielhāy-e Goftoguy-e Farhangi dar Jāme’ey-e Ālmān [Potentials of intercultural dialogue in German society] Dialog Center of the Imam Musa Sadr Institut.

Shokrkhah, Y., &Shokrkhah, Y.Kamali Chirani, F. (2009). Ruznāmenegāri Hamrāh va Pušeš-e Xabari Jang-e Iraq: Motāle’āt-e Muredi-ye Foxnews [Embedded journalism and coverage of the 2003 Iraq war: Case study by Foxnews]. Iranian Journal of Cultural Research, 2(5), 156-171.

Work for CID:

Fatemeh Kamali-Chirani has written a guest post, Cultural diplomacy, intercultural dialogue, and sustainable development: A view of the cultural diplomacy potential of the city of Islamabad; and also written KC105: Acculturation, KC113: Assimilation, and KC117: Remote Acculturation. She has also translated KC14: Dialogue into German, and then KC14: Dialogue and KC105: Acculturation into Persian. In addition, she was interviewed about international relations and its connection to intercultural dialogue. See the description of her recent report on immigration to and from Pakistan, and also Constructing ICD #14: Intercultural case management: Addressing discrimination to empower migrants.