Holly Oberle, PhD, is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Colorado Mesa University, specializing in Comparative Politics. She teaches courses in Comparative Politics, International Relations, Foreign Policy Analysis, Gender and Politics and Asian politics. She has lived and worked in Germany, Hungary, Spain, Bangladesh, Israel, Egypt and China, including two years teaching at Wenzhou-Kean University, a Sino-American joint-venture institution, and speaks German. She brings this international experience directly into the classroom through simulations, games and project-based coursework, and is particularly happy to talk with students about international careers and study abroad opportunities.
Oberle's research traces a recurring puzzle across several different settings: the mismatch between how power is supposed to work on paper and how it actually functions in practice. Her doctoral work at the Berlin School for Transnational Studies, Freie Universität Berlin, used discourse and metaphor analysis to study how gender shapes the language of American foreign policy. That same interest in formal rules versus lived reality later carried into her work on migration governance, and most recently into "paradiplomacy," her current project on how universities and city partnerships in the United States and China build international relationships that run alongside and sometimes ahead of, official state diplomacy. The project draws on a faculty-led study abroad program to El Salvador that she designed and directs, grounded in Grand Junction's sister-city relationship, together with her own institutional experience in China.
Oberle is also the author of an open-access textbook, Comparative Politics: A Practical Guide for a Globalizing World (Colorado Mesa University MORE OER Initiative), which centers around case studies, including several written by CMU political science students, that challenge Eurocentric accounts of sovereignty and statehood.
