Sylvia G Maier

Dr. Sylvia Maier is Academic Director and Clinical Professor in the Center for Global Affairs where she leads the MSGA Concentration in Global Gender Studies, the annual Global Field Intensive to the United Arab Emirates, and serves as faculty adviser to the MSGA Gender Working Group. Sylvia’s principal fields of interest and expertise are women’s rights and gender equality and with a particular focus on Western Europe, Latin America, the United Arab Emirates and wider GCC, Iraqi Kurdistan, and Afghanistan, where she has taught and conducted extensive field research. Sylvia is especially interested in the protection of LGBT rights as well as gender-inclusive urban planning and design, as well as the politics of gendered integration and multiculturalism in Western Europe, chiefly the legal responses to honor-based violence against women. She has spoken extensively and published on these and related subjects. Her co-edited book, titled EU Development Policies: Between Norms and Geopolitics was published by Palgrave Macmillan in February 2019. She is currently working on a field research-based project on feminist and gender-inclusive urban design in global cities (Vienna, Berlin, Tel Aviv, Abu Dhabi, and New York), on a field research project on biotrade, food security and women’s empowerment in Perú with her CGA colleague Jens Rudbeck, and, with another CGA colleague, Christopher Ankersen, on a book manuscript on Monarchies in Global Affairs. 

Sylvia’s teaching interests bridge the fields of gender studies and international politics and include Gender and International Affairs: Sex, Power and Politics, Gender and Migration, Women’s Rights in the Middle East and GCC Countries, International Relations Theory, The Geopolitics of Afghanistan, Ethics in International Affairs, and Analytic Skills. 

Sylvia is actively involved in faculty governance and leadership, having served as the Chair and Vice-Chair of the SPS Faculty Council, the SPS Senator to the Continuing Faculty Senate Council (CFSC) and on its Steering Committee, as well as on numerous university and school-wide committees and initiatives, including the SPS Intersectionality Lab, and the NYU Graduate Program Committee.

Complementing her academic work, Sylvia was the co-founder and deputy editor-in-chief of Women Across Frontiers, a digital women’s rights magazine, and currently serves as VP and Director of Education Programs as well as on the board of The Peace Project, Inc.

Prior to joining the CGA, Sylvia Maier was on the faculty of the Center for European and Mediterranean Studies at NYU and the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, where she worked on Islam-state relations and the politics of integration and multiculturalism in Western Europe. 

Sylvia received her Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Southern California in 2001.