Dr. Yousef Baker

Yousef Baker

Undergraduate Advisor 

Associate Professor of International Studies

Email: Yousef.Baker@csulb.edu

Office: LA3-103D

Dr. Yousef Baker is an Associate Professor of International Studies in the I/ST Department and also the co-director of the Middle East Studies Program. Dr. Baker’s career both as a student and an educator have been in California’s public education system, graduating from LAUSD, finishing his BA in Political Science from UCLA, his Master’s and Doctorate in Sociology from UCSB, and working at CSULB since 2014.

Yousef Baker

Dr. Baker looks at global political economy with an interest in how race, nationalism, sovereignty, post-colonial development, and social movements shape our contemporary world. His work focuses on the Middle East and North Africa, where he has been looking at the political economy of the 2003 invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq. Dr. Baker has been recently working on issues of anti-Muslim racism and their connection to larger national and global issues, where he shows how this racializing process shape politics in the US and broader global geo-politics as well. In addition to this research, Dr. Baker is one of the co-founders of the Iraqi Narratives Project, where alongside other collaborators he has collected oral histories of people who migrated from Iraq to the US and Canada.

As an educator, and as a resident of Long Beach since 2010, and greater Los Angeles since 1993, Dr. Baker is always asking how does our life locally shape and is shaped by the lives of others living around the globe?

Dr. Baker encourages students and community members to reach out to him over email or at office hours to talk and dialogue about all things International Studies!

Courses taught:

  • IST 100: Global Citizenship
  • IST 300: Special Topics – The World that Racism Built
  • IST 317: International Social Conflicts
  • IST 405: Un-imagining the Middle East
  • IST 463: Nationalism and National Identities
  • IST 490: Senior Thesis Seminar