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Global Studies Faculty

Dr. Michael Bowler's primary research area is development in Bangladesh.  He conducted dissertation research about the relationship between the people of a small village in southwestern Bangladesh and the largest Bangladeshi NGO, the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee (BRAC) for his Ph.D. In Social Science from the Maxwell School at Syracuse University.  Bowler continues to visit that village and in addition has directed and is on the Advisory Board for the Higher Education Consortium for Urban Affairs (St. Paul, MN) semester and January term programs in Bangladesh in conjunction with the Independent University Bangladesh (IUB).  Bowler also is interested in the global areas of inequality and material poverty as well as North South relations and refugee studies.   Besides Bangladesh, Bowler has also lived worked and studied in Singapore (U.S. Refugee Program), Indonesia (US Refugee Program), Thailand (Chiang Mai University and Catholic Relief Services), and Switzerland (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees).  Bowler has two daughters including one adopted from West Bengal in India.

Dr. Linda D'Amico has been associated with the Global Studies Program and teaches courses in the Latin American Studies Option. She is jointly assigned to Global Studies and Women and Gender Studies Programs.

Dr. Yogesh Grover is the director of the Global Studies Program. He joined Winona State University in 1988 and teaches in the Department of Political Science and Public Adminstration. His interest is in International Relations and Comparative Politics. Apart from directing the program, he teaches Introduction to Global Studies and Seminar in Global Studies.

Dr.Matthew Strecher joined us in Fall'07.. He will be teaching Japanese Language and Culture courses. Dr.Strecher received his doctorate in modern Japanese language and literature from the University of Washington in 1995.  In addition to eleven years of teaching Japanese language at the university level, Dr. Strecher taught Japanese literature and translation studies for seven years in Tokyo.  He has published two books on contemporary Japanese novelist Murakami Haruki, and is currently conducting research on Japanese literary journalism and other forms of creative nonfiction.  His literary interests include reportage, war fiction and nonfiction, genre issues, Japanese postmodernism, contemporary Japanese writing (particularly by young novelists), and modern Japanese film.

Dr. Weidong Zhang joined us in Fall'07 and has accepted a tenure track position here in 2008. He will be teaching courses in Chinese language and culture. Dr. Zhang has a Ph. D in Mass Communication, with a cultural-studies focus on Chinese culture and society from the University of Iowa; and an MA in Second Language Acquisition / Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language, also from the University of Iowa. His BA is from the Department of Chinese Language and Literature, Nanjing University, China.  His research interest lies at the intersection of language, media, culture, and Chinese society. His dissertation looks at the online presence of Chinese ethnic minorities, examining how people of a particular marginalized and underprivileged social group make meaning by using the new communication technologies of the Internet in their daily lives, and how they create a new space of hope to negotiate and articulate their cultural identity, and possibly bring about social change in a globalizing world, issues related to ethnicity, identity and community. His other research interests include language acquisition and cultural learning, Chinese media, popular culture and social change, cross-cultural communication, the marginalized social groups in Chinese society and social justice.