Robert A. Saunders is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of History, Politics, and Geography at Farmingdale State College-SUNY, having joined the college in 2006. He also served as Chair of the Science, Technology & Science B.S. program from 2012-2015 and Director of International Education and Programs (2015-2016). Professor Saunders has previously taught at Rutgers University, American Public University (APUS), Adelphi University, and Monmouth University. He has also given master classes in Lithuania, Denmark,  Germany, and the UK, as well as previously holding visiting researcher positions at the University of Leeds (2014), Aarhus University (2018), and Malmö University (2019).

Professor Saunders' research explores the changing nature of national, religious, and political identity in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. His doctoral research focused on the impact of the Internet on national identity among minority populations in the former Soviet Union, specifically ethnic Russians in Latvia and Kazakhstan. His early work examined textual and visual manifestations of minority nationalism, and its often unpredictable influence on world affairs and geographical imagination. This interest led him to investigate the battle for Kazakhstan's national image against the backdrop of Sacha Baron Cohen's 'Borat' parody of the Central Asian republic and the complexities of nation branding in a world defined by Fremdbebilderung or the state of being 'totally engulfed by foreign images'.

Over the past decade, Professor Saunders has focused on the role of television, film, novels, comics, and other popular media in the everyday conceptualization of geopolitics, from Putin parody videos to Black Panther (2018). Beginning in 2015, he began a wide-ranging exploration of Nordic noir television series and their impact on geographical imagination and geopolitical cultures across and beyond northern Europe. His current research agenda explores the Anthropo(s)cene, or how climate change, mass extinction, and other unpredictable outcomes of humans' terraforming of the planet are represented in dystopian films, cli-fi novels, and other forms of cultural production.

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