Victor I. Silverman

Victor Silverman is an Emmy-award winning filmmaker, historian and author. An internationally recognized scholar and the recipient of many prestigious fellowships and grants, Professor Silverman is the author of numerous books and articles. His films have screened on national and international television and in hundreds of film festivals, universities and community events around the world. He has expertise in the past and present of U.S. foreign relations, global institutions, and world social movements. This year he is on leave as the Fulbright/García U.S. Studies at the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México – ITAM.

His most recent film, “Getting High,” (2017) is a provocative, feature-length documentary about his family’s collision with drugs and alcohol set against a backdrop of our society’s bitter conflicts about the “War on Drugs.” Professor Silverman directed, produced, and wrote with Susan Stryker the Emmy-winning film “Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton’s Cafeteria,” about the night in 1966 when trans women and drag queens fought back against police violence in San Francisco's tough Tenderloin neighborhood.

Professor Silverman is the author of three books—plus an in-progress manuscript co-authored with Pomona Professor Miguel Tinker Salas: Trumplandia: The US and Latin America in the Age of Smoke and Mirrors. His other works include California: On the Road Histories; Los Angeles Times Front Page; and Imagining Internationalism. He has published numerous articles in the scholarly and popular press in the US and internationally. Professor Silverman’s scholarly work encompasses a diversity of topics including US, international politics, labor, Jewish, and environmental history. He earned his Ph.D. in History from the University of California, Berkeley in 1990 and has taught at universities in the US, China and Mexico.

Silverman has worked as union organizer and consulted with the international labor movement on sustainable development policy. He is a former radio public service and dramatic program producer and writer for KPFA, Berkeley and KRRC in Portland. He authored several plays and screenplays, including a stage adaptation of Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl,” which he directed. He also has been an actor, dancer, construction laborer and plumber.