UCLA faculty take on new roles in the leadership of the International Institute, its academic programs and its centers and programs.

UCLA International Institute, September 8, 2025 — A number of centers and programs of the International Institute welcomed new leaders on July 1, the official start of the 2025–26 academic year. Along with our returning leaders, they illustrate the disciplinary breadth, scholarly richness and global and local reach of the institute.

Academic Programs

Shaina Potts, associate professor, geography and the International Institute, has become chair of the institute’s global studies program, for which she has taught since joining UCLA in 2017. Potts replaces Mike Thies, institute associate vice provost and associate professor of political science, who was interim chair of the program.

Potts’ research sits at the intersection of political, legal and economic geography; critical legal studies; and international political economy. Her articles have been published in such journals as Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Antipode, Economy and Society, and Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space.

Her publications combine analyses of technical economic and legal processes with extensive historical and geopolitical contextualization to show how the perpetuation of North-South economic inequalities is shaped by the micro-operations of contracts, financial transactions and law. Her first monograph, “Judicial Territory: Law, Capital and the Expansion of American Empire” (Duke, 2024 – see article), received the 2025 Meridian Book Award for Outstanding Scholarly Work in Geography from the American Association of Geographers earlier this year.

The geographer’s current research examines minerals critical to the green transition, including their extraction, processing and supply chains, within a legal and financial geography framework.

Mike Thies, institute associate vice provost and associate professor of political science, will be interim chair of the international development studies program of the International Institute through December 31, 2022.

Thies has taught in the political science department since 1994, where he teaches courses on comparative politics, Japanese politics and constitutional design. His research focuses on political institutions, elections, parties and governance in developed democracies, with a particular focus on Japan. He has published more than 30 articles and chapters in top peer-reviewed political science journals and edited volumes on Japanese politics. He is co-author (with Frances Rosenbluth) of “Japan Transformed: Political Change and Economic Restructuring” (Princeton, 2010), which was translated into Japanese as “Nihon seiji no dai-tenkan: tetsu to kome no dōmei kara Nihon-gata jiyū-shugi e” in 2012.

Thies has a long record of service at the institute. He previously served as chair of both the global studies and international and area studies programs, director of the UCLA Terasaki Center for Japanese Studies and member of the faculty administrative/advisory committees of the International Institute, the UCLA Asia Institute (later the Asia Pacific Center) and the East Asian Studies M.A. program.

Institute and research center leadership

David Kim, professor of European languages and transcultural studies and associate vice provost of the International Institute, has assumed the post of institute equity advisor, replacing Shaina Potts in the post.

Respected by his peers as a scholar’s scholar and beloved by his students, Kim has broad intellectual interests that span postcolonial, global and migration studies; community engagement; human rights; cosmopolitanism; solidarity; and global literary histories. Among other books, he is the author of “Arendt’s Solidarity: Anti-Semitism and Racism in the Atlantic World” (Stanford, 2024), “Reframing Postcolonial Studies” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) and “Cosmopolitan Parables” (Northwestern, 2017).

Kim has received many scholarly honors, including an Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellowship, American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship, UCLA’s Academic Senate Distinguished Teaching Award and Gold Shield Faculty Prize (a UCLA alumni award for exemplary scholarship, teaching and service). Kim also directs the International Institute’s global studies summer travel-study program on international human rights in The Hague each July, which he launched in 2022.

Aomar Boum, Maurice Amado Endowed Chair in Sephardic Studies in the departments of Near Eastern cultures and languages, anthropology and history (see profile) and co-director of the Moroccan Jewish Studies Program at UCLA, has become interim director of the Center for Near Eastern Studies for the 2025–26 academic year. CNES Director Ali Behdad, John Charles Hills Professor of Literature in the English department at UCLA, is on sabbatical this year. A sociocultural anthropologist internationally recognized for his scholarship on ethnic and religious minorities (Jews, Baha’is, Shi‘a and Christians) and Jewish-Muslim relations in the Middle East and North Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa, Boum became the youngest member of the prestigious Academy of the Kingdom of Morocco in April 2025.

His most recent publications are a graphic history and a graphic novel, respectively, published in Arabic, English and French: “The Last Rekkas: Chronicles of a Foot Courier in Southern Morocco” (illustrated by his daughter, Majdouline Boum-Mendoza; Langages du Sud, 2024) and “Undesirables: A Holocaust Journey to North Africa” (illustrated by Nadjib Berber; Stanford, 2023). Other recent works include two volumes co-edited with Sarah A. Stein, “Wartime North Africa: A Documentary History, 1934–1950” (Stanford, 2022) and “The Holocaust and North Africa” (Stanford, 2019).

Boum is currently completing two books: “Morocco and the Holocaust: The Story of Mohammed V Saving Jews during WWII, 1940–2020” and “Moroccan Frames, Jewish Portraits: Diasporic Histories from Los Angeles” (tentative title).

Tanya Ivanova-Sullivan, associate professor of Slavic, East European and Eurasian languages and cultures, has become co-director of the Center for World Languages. She has served as associate director of the National Heritage Language Resource Center, a component part of CWL, since 2024.

Prior to joining UCLA in 2023, Ivanova-Sullivan held faculty appointments at the Ohio State University and the University of New Mexico. Her research focuses on applied and psycholinguistic aspects of the acquisition of Slavic languages, with a specialization in heritage language bilingualism across the lifespan.

She is the author of two monographs, “Approaches to Languages and Cultures” (Kendall Hunt, 2020) and “Theoretical and Experimental Aspects of Syntax-Discourse Interface in Heritage Grammars” (Brill, 2014).

S. Peter Cowe, who has been director of the Center for World Languages since 2018 (see profile), will now serve alongside Ivanova-Sullivan as CWL co-director. Distinguished Narekatsi Professor of Armenian Studies in the department of Near Eastern languages and cultures at UCLA, Cowe has written on topics ranging from medieval Armenian theology and intellectual history to the evolution of the Armenian language to modern Armenian theater and Armenian nationalism.

In addition to descriptive guides of Armenian archives held by UCLA and Cambridge University libraries, Cowe’s publications include “Modern Armenian Drama: An Anthology” (Columbia, 2001); “The Deaconess in the Armenian Church” (Saint Nersess Armenian Seminary, 1994), “Mxit’ar Sasnec’i’s Theological Discourses” (Peeters, 1993) and “The Armenian Version of Daniel” (University of Pennsylvannia Armenian Texts and Studies, 1992).

Cowe’s work at CWL to date has included promoting a dual-immersion English-Armenian program in Glendale schools, a heritage language pedagogical review in Armenian schools and the Armenian Oratorical Competition at UCLA. He recently received funding from the British Library for a research project on Armenian language transition in Transylvania.

Cecilia Menjívar, Dorothy L. Meier Chair and distinguished professor of sociology at UCLA, has become director of the Center for the Study of International Migration, taking the reins from the center’s founding director, Distinguished Professor of Sociology Roger Waldinger. Menjívar has been an active faculty member of CSIM since joining UCLA in 2018 and previously chaired its faculty advisory committee.

The sociology professor publishes widely in two empirical areas: immigration from Central America to the United States and gender-based violence in Central America, within a framework of state power. Her award-winning scholarship includes three books ("Immigrant Families," Wiley, 2016; "Enduring Violence: Ladina Women’s Lives in Guatemala," Oxford, 2011; and "Fragmented Ties: Salvadoran Immigrant Networks in America," UC, 2000); 17 edited volumes; and over 150 articles, chapters and essays.

Menjívar’s work as a scholar, teacher and mentor has been recognized by such honors as a John S. Guggenheim Fellowship, Andrew Carnegie Fellowship and two career awards conferred by different sections of the American Sociological Association. She has served as both vice president (2013–16) and president (2020–23) of the ASA. Menjívar was named a Social Justice Hero by the Museum of Social Justice in Los Angeles in 2021 and elected as a W.E.B. Dubois Fellow to the American Academy of Political and Social Science in 2023.

Yusuke Tsugawa, M.D., M.P.H., Ph.D., associate professor of medicine and health policy in the Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health, has become associate director of the Terasaki Center for Japanese Studies. Tsugawa is also the founding director of the UCLA Department of Medicine Data Core, and founder and board chair of the Japan Health Policy Research Association. He assumes the post from Kristopher Kersey, assistant professor of art history, who served as interim associate director in the previous academic year.

Tsugawa earned his medical degree from Tohoku University School of Medicine in Japan, his M.P.H. from Harvard School of Public Health and his Ph.D. in health policy from Harvard University, with a concentration in statistics. His research focuses on how healthcare quality, patient outcomes and costs vary between physicians and health systems and what drives these differences. Tsugawa also applies artificial intelligence and machine learning to uncover how different healthcare treatments and policy changes affect people in different ways.

Before joining UCLA, he worked at Harvard School of Public Health, the World Bank and St. Luke's International Hospital in Tokyo. His studies have been published in prestigious medical journals, including JAMA Internal Medicine, Annals of Internal Medicine and PNAS. His groundbreaking research comparing the care quality of male and female physicians was recognized by Altmetric as the third most widely-read article of 2017. His work has been featured in major news outlets, including The New York Times, The Washington Post and National Public Radio, helping translate complex medical research findings for the public.

Steven E. Zipperstein (UCLA 1979), distinguished senior fellow at the Center for Middle East Development, where he previously served as associate director (April 2024–June 2025), has become director of the Younes and Soraya Nazarian Center for Israel Studies. He assumes the post from Interim Director Mark Kligman, UCLA professor of ethnomusicology.

For the past seven years, Zipperstein has taught courses at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, the UCLA International Institute (global studies program) and the Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science. In addition, he has been a visiting professor at Tel Aviv University Law School since 2019 and a visiting lecturer at the Hertie School in Berlin since 2024. The lawyer-scholar is the author of three books, all published by Routledge: “The Legal Case for Palestine: A Critical Assessment” (2024), “Zionism, Palestinian Nationalism and the Law: 1939–1948” (2022), and “Law and the Arab-Israeli Conflict: The Trials of Palestine” (2020). He has also published several peer-reviewed articles in academic journals and law reviews.

Zipperstein practiced law for 40 years as a litigator in law firms, federal prosecutor, U.S. Department of Justice official and as chief legal officer of both BlackBerry Ltd. and Verizon Wireless. In the Department of Justice, he rose to become the highest-ranking career lawyer in the United States Attorney’s office in Los Angeles, where he tried more than a dozen felony jury cases and argued 23 cases before the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.

Published: Monday, September 8, 2025