Tom Reifer is an Assistant Professor of Sociology, an affiliated faculty in Ethnic Studies, and serves on the advisory committee of the Joan B. Kroc Institute for Peace & Justice at USD. He also serves on the Gender Studies Advisory Committee and is a Resident Faculty in the Laguna Building at the Alcala Vistas. He is currently an Associate Fellow at the Amsterdam-based Transnational Institute, a worldwide fellowship of committed scholar-activists. He was formerly a Senior Research Scholar at Focus on the Global South based in Asia and Associate Director of the Institute for Research on World-Systems (IROWS) and the Program on Global Studies at UC Riverside. He is also currently a Research Associate at the Fernand Braudel Center for the Study of Economies, Historical Systems & Civilizations at SUNY Binghamton - where he received his MA & PhD - and IROWS. His specialty is the study of large-scale, long-term social change and world-systems analysis. He has published on a variety of subjects, including in the Encyclopedia of Intelligence & Counterintelligence (2005), the Cambridge Dictionary of Sociology (2006) and the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (2nd edition, 2008). He is currently working on a series of book projects, including Blown Away: US Militarism, Hurricane Katrina and the Challenges of the 21st Century; Earth, Wind & Fire, and Violence, Profits & Power.
