Tom Reifer

Associate Professor of Sociology
University of San Diego

Tom Reifer is an associate professor of Sociology and an affiliated faculty in the Ethnic Studies Department, and Women & Gender Studies Program at the University of San Diego, and an Associate Fellow at the Amsterdam based Transnational Institute, a worldwide fellowship of committed scholar-activists. He is author of numerous co-authored and edited books, book chapters, articles and dictionary and encyclopedia entries, and has published in the Cambridge Dictionary of Sociology (2006), the Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Globalization (2012), and New Left Review, including on world-systems analysis, one of his many areas of specialization, and Blown Away: US Militarism & Hurricane Katrina, in Hillary Potter, ed., Racing the Storm, Lexington Books, 2007, and September 11th, Terrorism & the Globalization of Human Rights (TNI, 2008). Recently, he co-authored the book, The Torturer in the Mirror, with former US Attorney General Ramsey Clark and Iraqi dissident Haifa Zangana (Seven Stories Press, 2010), and wrote a chapter, “Torture, War & Presidential Power: Thoughts on the Current Constitutional Crisis,” in the collection edited by Marjorie Cohn, The United States & Torture: Interrogation, Incarceration, & Abuse, just out in paperback from New York University Press in 2012. He has written widely on the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street movement.

Tom has also been a long-time activist in peace and justice movement, including with the Los Angeles Catholic Worker. His most recent work is “Beyond the Triangle of Emancipation: Tupac’s Hip Hop Theory of Criminal (In)justice, the Pope’s Playlist, & the Prophetic Imagination,”  forthcoming in Carceral Notebooks (Volume 3, available online) published by Dr. Bernard Harcourt, Professor of Law & Criminology & Chair of the Political Science Department at the University of Chicago, and the edited book, Global Crises, Antisystemic Movements, & the Challenges of the 21st Century, forthcoming from Paradigm Publishers. Formerly, Tom was the associate director of the Institute for Research on World-Systems (IROWS), and Program on Global Studies, at UC Riverside, and is currently a Research Associate at IROWS & the Fernard Braudel Center for the Study of Economies, Historical Systems & Civilizations at Binghamton University. He is currently writing a book, Lawyers, Guns & Money: Wall Street & the American Century.