Bob Graham Center for Public Service

Timothy Karis (Ph.D. University of California, San Diego, 2013) is the undergraduate coordinator for the Bob Graham Center, and a lecturer in the International Studies Program at the University of Florida.

As undergraduate coordinator, Karis will help integrate the Center's focus on civic engagement, public leadership, and public service with the International Studies program and curriculum. International Studies offers a vibrant, dynamic undergraduate program with approximately 275 students who pursue careers in government service, with NGOs and humanitarian assistance, in global media, in private business and law, and other areas as they seek to have positive impact on various communities in Florida or across the world.

At UF, Karis teaches courses on politics and power, migration and citizenship, urban development, and human rights, as well as regionally-focused courses on Southeast and East Asia.

His primary research site is Hanoi, Vietnam, where he has conducted more than two years of ethnographic research on migration, urban development, and citizenship. His current book project, titled Urban Footprints: Modernization and Migration in the Construction of a New Hanoi, examines what kinds of places, and what kinds of spatial politics are emerging in the expanding, unfinished urban periphery occupied by recent migrants and onetime villages situated on newly coveted land.

Previously, Karis has published articles in Migration Studies and The Asia-Pacific Journal of Anthropology on the topics of rural-to-urban migration and residential rights in urban Vietnam. Most recently, he has published work in a special edition of the journal CITY devoted to new social scientific approaches to construction in Southeast Asia, contributing an article on Hanoi’s in-progress elevated metro train project.