Affiliated Faculty

Michael Cohen

Michael Cohen is broadly interested in the cultural and political history of the United States from the Civil War to the Present. Teaching Areas: US Cultural History from the Civil War to the Present; Work and Labor History; World War II; Race, class and American popular culture; Cultural Studies and Marxist Theory; Drugs and Alcohol in US History

Jovan Scott Lewis

Jovan Scott Lewis (Ph.D., London School of Economics) is an economic anthropologist who works in the field sites of Tulsa, Oklahoma and Montego Bay, Jamaica. His research examines the cultural mechanisms, institutional forms, and social practices through which an unequal living of, and coping with, the economy, its failures and contingencies are understood.

Darieck Scott

Prof. Scott’s teaching and research interests include: 20th and 21st century African American literature; creative writing; queer theory, and LGBTQ studies; race, gender and sexuality in fantasy, science fiction, and comic books.

john a. powell

john a. powell is an internationally recognized expert in the areas of civil rights and civil liberties and a wide range of issues including race, structural racism, ethnicity, housing, poverty, and democracy.

Tianna Paschel

Prof. Paschel’s 2016 book, Becoming Black Political Subjects: Movements and Ethno-Racial Rights in Colombia and Brazil, examines the shift from colorblind state discourses to the adoption of ethno-racial policies in Colombia and Brazil in the 1990s, as well as the impact this shift has had on political institutions and broader socio-cultural change in these countries. More broadly, research interests are in the fields of race and ethnicity, politics and development and globalization

Chiyuma Elliott

Chiyuma Elliott is Assistant Professor of African American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Her scholarly work and teaching focus on poetry and poetics, visual culture, and intellectual history from the 1920s to the present. Before joining the Berkeley faculty, Elliott was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford, and Assistant Professor of English, Creative Writing, and African American Studies at the University of Mississippi. A Cave Canem Alumni Fellow, she has also received fellowships from the American Philosophical Society, the James Irvine Foundation, and the Vermont Studio Center. She earned her M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Warren Wilson College and her Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Texas at Austin.

Brandi Wilkins Catanese

African American Theater and popular culture; performance theory; performance and politics; performance and diaspora; Black Theater Workshop. Joint appointment in African American Studies, Affiliated faculty in Gender and Women’s Studies. Articles in Theatre Journal, Performance Research, Journal of American Drama and Theatre, and Contemporary African American Women Playwrights: A Casebook; forthcoming articles on black women’s diaspora performance; whiteface performance; the politics of representation in black theater; and black political culture. Catanese is currently completing Racial Transgressions, a book-length study of the impact of multiculturalism and colorblindness on black performance practices.

Ula Taylor

Prof. Taylor is the co-author of Panther: The Illustrated History of the Black Panther Movement and the Story Behind the Film. She teaches two required history courses in African American Studies and courses such as the Civil Rights Movement of the 60’s and African American Women’s History. Current work in progress: Re-Gendering a Nation: A History of the Nation of Islam. (Read more about Professor Taylor in the Fall 2002 issue of FaultLines.)

Stephen Small

Stephen Small’s research is organized around the social scientific analysis of contemporary racial formations, and addresses links between historical structures and contemporary manifestations of racial formations in the USA and elsewhere in the Diaspora. His interests include race and representations in public history and collective memory; racial formations in Europe and the US; and race and race mixture in the US and the Caribbean under slavery and in contemporary times.

Leigh Raiford

My teaching and research interests include race, gender and visual culture with an emphasis on film and photography; race and racial formations of the United States; twentieth century African American social movements; memory; and black popular culture.

Nikki Jones

Areas of expertise include urban ethnography, urban sociology, race and ethnic relations and criminology and criminal justice, with a special emphasis on the intersection of race, gender, and justice.

Robert Allen (Emeritus)

I study social movements & political economy. I’m currently researching the life and work of C.L. Dellums, a major California labor and civil rights activist of national stature who, with A. Philip Randolph, was an organizer and leader of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters’ Union, the largest black labor union in U.S. history. An Oakland resident, Dellums used his union base to lead the struggle against employment discrimination generally, ultimately securing passage of California’s historic Fair Employment Practices law. As director of the West Coast Region of the NAACP he also played a critical role in the fight against discrimination in housing.

Nicholas Laluk

Nicholas C. Laluk is an Assistant Professor at the University of California Berkeley, Department of Anthropology.  His areas of interest are: Decolonization and Indigenization, Indigenous Methodologies, Tribal sovereignty-driven research

William (Bill) A. White III

Prior to joining UC Berkeley, Bill worked for the Bureau of Applied Research in Anthropology (BARA) where he specialized in historical artifact analysis, building documentation, ethnography, and archeological fieldwork. His dissertation research project was conducted in his hometown of Boise, Idaho where he focused on using community based participatory research to investigate the past of a multi-racial neighborhood. His current work centers around a public archaeology project with African American descendant communities on St. Croix in the United States Virgin Islands. Current research interests include community based participatory research, historical archaeology, historic preservation, and heritage conservation.

Karen Nakamura

My research is on disability, sexuality, and other minority social movements in contemporary Japan. In 2006, I published Deaf in Japan: Signing and the Politics of Identity, an ethnography of sign language and deaf social movements. My second project on psychiatric disabilities and community based recovery resulted in two ethnographic films and a book titled, A Disability of the Soul: An Ethnography of Schizophrenia and Mental Illness in Contemporary Japan (2014). My books, films, and articles have resulted in numerous prizes including the John Whitney Hall Book Prize, the SVA Short Film Award, and David Plath Media Award. I’m currently finishing a project on trans movements as disability in Japan while launching a new project on robotics, augmentation, and prosthetic technology.

Cori Hayden

My research focuses on the anthropology of the biochemical sciences, global pharmaceutical politics, and postcolonial engagements with intellectual property, copying, and the politics of innovation and appropriation.  These themes animated my 2003 book, When Nature Goes Public: The Making and Unmaking of Bioprospecting in Mexico, which examined the consequences of novel drug discovery partnerships linking global drug companies, Latin American research scientists, and indigenous communities.  A key theme emerging from that work was how new deployments of the idioms of intellectual property serve as engines of both privatization and ‘public-ization,’ or the reconfiguration of notions of the public, the commons, and the public domain.  Subsequent projects have taken up this concern in a variety of ways, including in the ethics of benefit-sharing in clinical trials (Taking as Giving), the ways that liberal concerns over piracy and improper copying continue to animate liberatory projects undertaken in the name of the public domain (The Proper Copy), and an investigation of how appeals to the ‘popular’ and populism may  disrupt liberal epistemologies organized around public and private.

Laurie Wilkie

Sarah E. Vaughn

Sarah E. Vaughn is a sociocultural anthropologist working at the intersection of environmental anthropology, critical social theory, and science and technology studies.   She received her B.A. in 2006 from Cornell University, majoring as a College Scholar with a focus in Anthropology, Sociology, and Inequality Studies.  She was awarded a Ph.D. in 2013 from the Department of Anthropology, Columbia University. Her research advances understandings of climate change in the Circum-Caribbean while tracking the affective, ethical, and political components of dignity and belonging.  At stake in her research are questions about the role climate change has in shaping the materiality of expertise, an ethics of (re)distribution, and narrative form.  She is affiliated with the Center for Science, Technology and Medicine, The Program in Critical Theory, and the Program in Development Engineering.

Stefania Pandolfo

Cultural Anthropology, theories of subjectivity, postcolonial criticism, anthropology and literature; Islam, Middle East and the Maghreb

Donald Moore

My work focuses on power, spatiality, and race. I have conducted over 30 months of ethnographic fieldwork on agrarian micro-politics in Eastern Zimbabwe. This work explores the cultural politics of landscape and identity, focusing on both colonial and postcolonial governmentality, those assemblages of practice that promote self-disciplining subjects. I use both historical and ethnographic prisms to examine racialized regimes of rule in southern Africa, notably conflicts over land, labor, and livelihood. This ethnographic work on situated struggles tries to bring a more enlivened spatial sensitivity to contemporary anthropological formulations of the cultural politics of place, power, and identity. A brief period of field research in South Africa focused on post-apartheid land claims and the cultural politics of recognition and redistribution.

Charles Hirschkind

Daniel Fisher

Lawrence Cohen

Lawrence Cohen’s primary field is the critical study of medicine, health, and the body. His book No Aging in India is about Alzheimer’s disease, the body and the voice in time, and the cultural politics of senility. His two current projects are India Tonite, which examines homoerotic identification and representation in the context of political and market logics in urban north India, and The Other Kidney about the nature of immunosuppression and its accompanying global traffic in organs for transplant.

Aihwa Ong

My research and teaching have always dealt with the multiple connections between the United States and Asia. I have written on overseas Chinese and on Southeast Asian refugees in the United States. I treat the experiences of Asian immigrants as a lens through which to ruminate on American citizenship, and its reliance on race and gender modes of governing. Currently, I am completing a book of essays that discusses the links between neoliberal values and citizenship expectations in various locales in the Asia Pacific. A new project explores the interplay of knowledge, race and gender in globalizing Asian cities.

Meg Conkey

Feminist thought in anthropology and archaeology; the archaeology of gender, and the representation of gender in the past. (Also, early human visual culture; prehistory of Europe; archaeology and outreach; archaeology and multimedia.)

Charles Briggs

I have long been interested in the politics of language, knowledge, and communication, particularly as they inform and are informed by constructions of modernity and tradition and modes of structuring and naturalizing social inequalities. I have worked extensively in Chicano/a communities in New Mexico and indigenous communities in Venezuela, and I am now conducting research in Cuba, Venezuela, and California. My work focuses on racial inequalities in health and constructions of popular violence, and I am currently exploring how imaginations of knowledge and communication produce and stratify subjectivities, particularly through news coverage of health issues.

Ronald Rael

Professor Ronald Rael holds the Eva Li Memorial Chair in Architecture and a joint appointment in the Department of Architecture, in the College of Environmental Design, and the Department of Art Practice. He is both a Bakar and Hellman Fellow, Director the Masters of Architecture program, and founded the printFARM Laboratory (print Facility for Architecture, Research and Materials). His research interests connect indigenous and traditional material practices to contemporary technologies and issues and he is a design activist, author, and thought leader within the topics of additive manufacturing, borderwall studies, and earthen architecture. In 2014 his creative practice, Rael San Fratello (with architect Virginia San Fratello), was named an Emerging Voice by The Architectural League of New York—one of the most coveted awards in North American architecture. In 2016 Rael San Fratello was also awarded the Digital Practice Award of Excellence by the The Association for Computer Aided Design in Architecture (ACADIA).

C. Greig Crysler

Prof. Crysler leads an overlapping program of teaching, research and service concerned with activism and the spatial politics of urban life.

Atreyee Gupta

Atreyee Gupta’s area of expertise is Global Modernism, with a special emphasis on the aesthetic and intellectual flows that have cut across Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America from the twentieth century onwards. Her research and teaching interests cluster around visual and intellectual histories of twentieth-century art; the intersections among the Cold War, the Non-Aligned Movement, and art after 1945; new media and experimental cinema; and the question of the global more broadly. Gupta is presently completing Non-Aligned: Decolonization, Modernism, and the Third World Project, India ca. 1930–1960, a book on the artistic and intellectual resonances of the Non-Aligned Movement during the Cold War era and the interwar anti-colonial Afro-Asian networks that preceded it. Her coedited books include Postwar – A Global Art History, 1945–1965 (with Okwui Enwezor).

Lauren Kroiz

Prof. Lauren Kroiz focuses on modern art in the United States. She is particularly interested in the history and theory of photography and new media, race and ethnic studies, and the relationships between regionalism, nationalism and globalism.

Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby

Prof. Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby specializes in 18th- through early 20th-century French and American art and visual and material culture, particularly in relation to the politics of race and colonialism. Grigsby writes on painting, sculpture, photography and engineering as well as the relationships among reproductive media and new technologies from the 18th to the early 20th centuries.

Julia Bryan-Wilson

Research interests include theories of artistic labor, feminist and queer theory, performance, production/fabrication, craft histories, photography, video, visual culture of the nuclear age, and collaborative practices.

Stephanie Syjuco

Stephanie Syjuco works in photography, sculpture, and installation, moving from handmade and craft-inspired mediums to digital editing. Her projects explore the tension between the authentic and the counterfeit, challenging deep-seated assumptions about history, race, and labor. Syjuco’s installations frequently invite viewers to be active participants in order to investigate global consumerism and capitalism. Through photographic portraits composed in the studio, Syjuco further explores economies of labor and value, with a political dimension inspired by colonialist ethnographic photography, her background as an immigrant, and media-filtered protest imagery. She was a 2019 Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow, researching the gaps and margins of the archive.

Allan deSouza

Allan deSouza works across different disciplines, including photography, digital media, text, performance, and pedagogy. Their work examines, restages, and counters colonizing legacies through strategies of humor, fabulation, and (mis)translation. deSouza has shown extensively in the US and internationally, including at SF Camerawork; the Phillips Collection, Washington, DC; Krannert Museum, IL; Blaffer Museum, TX; Pompidou Centre, Paris; Mori Museum, Tokyo; African Photography Encounters Biennale, Bamako, Mali; Gwangju Biennale, Korea; and Guangzhou Triennale, China. deSouza has published two recent books: How Art Can Be Thought: A Handboook for Change (Duke University Press, 2018), examines possibilities for decolonizing art pedagogy and critique. The book provides an extensive analytical glossary of some of the most common terms used to discuss art, focusing on their current usage while considering how those terms may be adapted to new artistic and social challenges; Ark of Martyrs: An Autobiography of V (Sming Sming Books, 2020), is a polyphonic rewrite of Joseph Conrad’s infamous Heart of Darkness (1899), and with a dysphoric, dystopian narrative set on a cruise ship that’s adrift and under quarantine. deSouza’s essays and fiction have been published in numerous journals, anthologies, and catalogues, including Third Text, London, Art Practical, and Shifter Journal, NY.

Asma Kazmi

Asma Kazmi’s oeuvre comprises drawings, performances, artist’s texts, sculptural installations, photographs, and virtual reality projects. Her research-based art works combine the virtual as well as material objects to create complex visual, aural, and haptic relations unearthing invisible, forgotten, and ignored histories. Kazmi works between the US, India, Pakistan, Europe, and the Middle East to create works that are legible in various cultural contexts. A representative example is her recent work called Indian Mangoes by the Red Sea. This video triptych offers moments of devotional interaction between two bodies: human and fruit. Shot in Jeddah, a port city of Saudi Arabia at the confluence of the Red Sea, the work asks questions about trade routes, global flows of migrant laborers, memorialization of demolished structures, and the visual aesthetics of growth and decay in urban environments. Asma Kazmi was born and raised in Pakistan.

Carolyn Chen

Prof. Chen is the author of the book Getting Saved in America: Taiwanese Immigration and Religious Experience (Princeton 2008) and co-editor of Sustaining Faith Traditions: Race, Ethnicity and Religion among the Latino and Asian-American Second Generation (NYU 2012). She is currently working on a book that examines the usage of Asian spiritual practices in Silicon Valley firms.

Sau-Ling C. Wong

Construction of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and national & cultural membership in Asian American literature, esp. Chinese American literature and Chinese-language immigrant literature and film.

Ling-Chi Wang (Emeritus)

Asian American history, Asian American civil rights issues; Overseas Chinese; U.S. foreign policies in Asia; bilingual education; and Asian Americans in higher education.

Khatharya Um

Prof. Um has written and published extensively on the politics and developments in Southeast Asia, particularly Indochina, and has participated in many international conferences on the Pacific Rim. She brings to the field of Asian American Studies an emphasis on the socio-historical and comparative approaches to refugee and migration studies. Her current research interests focus on transnational and on cultural transmission in the context of population dislocation.

Lok Siu

Transnationalism; Migration; Cultural Citizenship; Un/Belonging; Racial, Ethnic, and Gender Formation; Asians in the Americas; Cultural Politics of Food; Ethnography

Michael Omi (Emeritus)

Racial Theory and Politics, Racial/Ethnic Classification and Identity, Comparative Racialization, Asian Americans and racial stratification, racial and ethnic categories and the U.S. Census, and both racist and anti-racist social movements.

Elaine Kim (Emerita)

I am interested in Asian American literature and visual art, Korean American literary and cultural studies, representations of gender and ethnicity, sites of conflict and collaboration among racialized groups, and U.S. public education.

Catherine Ceniza Choy

Asian American History; Philippine and Filipino American Studies; Adoption; Nursing; Migration; Gender

Laura Kray

My research explores the impact of gender stereotypes on how men and women negotiate. Specifically, I explore the contexts under which women fall prey to the negative stereotype that they are ineffective negotiators versus react against it and prevail at the bargaining table. I explore the interplay between power, cognition, and motivation in mixed-gender negotiations.

Ramon Grosfoguel

Decoloniality; International Migration; Political-Economy of the World-System; Racism; Islamophobia

Alex Saragoza

Alex M. Saragoza received his Ph.D. in Latin American history from University of California, San Diego. A specialist on modern Mexico. Saragoza’s work delves into the intersections of Latin American history with that of the United States as a consequence of migration. His research has examined the structural origins of Mexican migration, focusing on the role of the state in the process of the concentration of wealth and power in Mexico. In addition, he has done research on the transnational aspects of cultural formations in Mexico, including work on Mexican cinema, radio and television. His current interests center on ideology and representation from a transnational perspective.

Laura Pérez

Post-sixties U.S. Latina/o literary, visual, and performance arts; U.S. women of color femininist and queer thought; decolonial spiritualities, decolonial aesthetics. (Read more about Professor Perez in the Spring 2004 issue of FaultLines.)

Beatriz Manz (Emerita)

Interested in Mayan populations, refugees, migration to the US, Latin America; Peasantry; Migrations; Social movements; Human Rights; Political/Social/Ethnic Conflict

Raúl Coronado

Research interests: The comparative history of writing in the colonial and 19th century Americas; Latina/o intellectual & literary history; theories of modernity & postcolonialism; histories of sexuality & of the academic disciplines

Charisma Acey

Charisma Acey is an associate professor in the Department of City and Regional Planning. Her background includes work, research and travel to countries in West Africa, southern Africa and Central America. Her work focuses on local and regional environmental sustainability, with a focus on poverty reduction, urban governance, environmental justice, and access to basic services. Her work relies on both quantitative and participatory, qualitative research approaches to understanding individual and household demand for improved infrastructure and environmental amenities. Current and past research projects, teaching and service learning courses have focused on addressing barriers to sustainable development such as human-environment interactions at multiple scales in urban areas around the world, poverty and participatory approaches to governance and development, the financing and sustainability of publicly provided services and utilities such as water and sanitation, local and regional food systems, environmental justice, and urbanization domestically and globally.

Jason Corburn

Jason Corburn is a Professor in the Department of City and Regional Planning and School of Public Health. He directs the Institute of Urban and Regional Development and the Center for Global Healthy Cities at UC Berkeley. He also coordinates the joint Master of City Planning (MCP) and Master of Public Health (MPH) degree program at UC Berkeley. His research focuses on the links between environmental health and social justice in cities, notions of expertise in science-based policy making, and the role of local knowledge in addressing environmental and public health problems. Professor Corburn’s research and practice works to build partnerships between urban residents, professional scientists and decision-makers in order to collaboratively generate policy and planning solutions that improve the qualities of cities and the well-being of residents, particularly the poor and people of color.

Malo Hutson

Malo André Hutson is an Associate Professor and the Chancellor’s Professor of City and Regional Planning.  He is also the Associate Director of the Institute of Urban and Regional Planning (IURD) and Chair of the Urban Studies Program at the University of California at Berkeley.  His research focuses on community development and urban sustainability/equity; racial/ethnic inequalities and urban policy (metropolitan fragmentation, segregation and health); and built enviornment and health.

Sara Mameni

I am an art historian specializing in contemporary transnational art and visual culture in the Arab/Muslim world with an interdisciplinary research on racial discourse, transnational gender politics, militarism, oil cultures and extractive economies in West Asia. I am currently completing my first book titled Crude: The Art of Living in the Terracene, that considers the emergence of the Anthropocene as a new geological era in relation to the concurrent declaration of the War on Terror in the early 2000s. Playing on the words “terror” and “terra,” I propose the term “Terracene” in order to think the planetary in conjunction with ongoing militarization of transnational regions under terror. Crude engages contemporary art and aesthetic productions, paying particular attention to artists navigating the geopolitics of petrocultures and climate change.

Alisa Bierria

Alisa Bierria is an Assistant Professor in Ethnic Studies at UC Riverside. Research interests include gender violence, redress, feminist/queer carceral studies, black feminist and feminist of color theory, social ontology, and popular culture.

Christian Paiz

Comparative Latino Studies, United States History, Social Movement History, Historical Methods

Keith Feldman

Theories of Race, Nation, and Empire; Cultural Theory; African, Arab, and Jewish Diasporas; Visual Culture Studies; Transnational American Studies

Juana María Rodríguez

Professor Rodríguez is the author of two books, Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces (NYU 2003) and Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures and Other Latina Longings (NYU 2014) and has published numerous articles related to her research interests in sexuality studies, queer activism in a transnational American context, critical race theory, technology and media arts, and Latin@ and Caribbean studies. She is currently working on a third book project that considers the intersection of age, sexuality, race and visual culture. (Read more about Prof. Rodriguez in the Fall 2009 issue of FaultLines.)

Mario Barrera

I’m currently in the process of finishing a documentary film entitled “Latino Stories of World War II.” My most recent article is “Are Latinos A Racialized Minority,” which has been submitted for publications. I expect my future academic research to focus on the relationship between American political parties, on the one hand, and ethnic and religious groups on the other.

Evelyn Nakano Glenn (Emerita)

My research interests focus on the political economy of households, the intersection of race and gender, immigration, and citizenship. My current project is a historical comparative study of the transnational race and gender division of caring labor, which examines historical continuities in the association between unequal citizenship and caring labor.

Anne-Lise Francois

Anne-Lise François joined the Departments of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California at Berkeley as an assistant professor in 1999, after receiving her doctorate in Comparative Literature from Princeton University. Her teaching and research focus on (mostly) 19th-century British, American and European (French and German) fiction, poetry and thought, with some excursions into the 17th, 18th, and early 20th centuries. She has taught courses on the modern period in British and American literary history, Henry James, Emily Dickinson, as well as seminars and graduate courses in the Comparative Literature Department on European “Green” Romanticism and aesthetic theory, and on the writing and epistemology of love; her current teaching focuses on the convergence of literary and environmental studies. In areas as diverse as contemporary food and farming politics and debates on climate change and the temporality of environmental violence, she continues to seek alternatives to Enlightenment models of heroic action, productive activity, and accumulation, and to identify examples of the ethos of recessive fulfillment and non-actualization theorized in Open Secrets.

Karl Britto

Francophone colonial and postcolonial literatures of Vietnam, Africa and the Caribbean

Chana Kronfeld

Modernist women poets (Hebrew, Yiddish, English); feminist stylistics; the marginal as exemplary in literary history; ideology in literary historiography; translation as cultural negotiation. Current projects include: The Grammars of Gender and the Genders of Grammar: Rereading the “Woman as Land” Metaphor; Israeli anti-war poetry and the return of the political poem; a monograph titled The Full Severity of Compassion: The Poetry of Yehuda Amichai, and a collaborative translation project (with Chana Bloch), the Selected Poetry of Dahlia Ravikovitch, the leading Israeli woman poet and peace activist.

Andrew Jones

Professor Jones teaches modern Chinese literature and media culture. His research interests include music, cinema, and media technology, modern and contemporary fiction, children’s literature, and the cultural history of the global 1960s.

Patricia Baquedano-Lopez

Patricia Baquedano-López examines the intersection of language, race, and education. A strand of her research focuses on Indigenous Latinx students and examines processes and practices of settler colonialism in education.  A recent project (with Adriana Cruz-Manjarrez, University of Colima) centers on indigeneity,  transnational displacements,  processes of return migration, and education in the Maya diaspora Yucatan-California. This project builds on Professor Baquedano-López’s long-term ethnographic study at a local elementary school recognizing and supporting Indigenous sovereignty among Maya students and their families in diaspora.

Cati V. de los Ríos

Cati V. de los Ríos is an Assistant Professor of Literacy, Reading, and Bi/Multilingual Education at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Education. Her scholarship draws from ethnographic, participatory, and community-based methodologies to explore the rich language and literacy resources that Latinx young people (primarily those of Mexican and Central American descent) deploy and develop across educational settings. Her research is informed by sociocultural, critical, and translingual theories of language and literacy.

Tesha Sengupta-Irving

Dr. Sengupta-Irving’s research explores the sociocultural, disciplinary, and political dimensions of children’s  mathematics learning. Broadly, her work asks a deceptively simple question: What, in addition to mathematics, do children learn when they learn mathematics? Dr. Sengupta-Irving works closely with teachers  to understand and design pedagogical approaches that promote racially minoritized children’s fluency in disciplinary ideas and practies, while also engendering a sense of joy, agency, and collectivism in learning.  Through a mix of prolonged ethnographic study, teaching experiments, and microanalyses of children’s interactions, her work generates new knowledge to resist neoliberal logics that render math learning a stratifying project of race, class, and gender in schools.

Thomas M. Philip

Philip’s research focuses on how teachers make sense of power and hierarchy in classrooms, schools, and society. He is interested in how teachers act on their sense of agency as they navigate and ultimately transform classrooms and institutions toward more equitable, just, and democratic practices and outcomes. His most recent scholarship explores the possibilities and tensions that emerge with the use of digital learning technologies in the classroom, particularly discourses about the promises of these tools with respect to the significance or dispensability of teacher pedagogy.

Travis J. Bristol

Travis J. Bristol is an assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley’s Graduate School of Education. Before joining Berkeley’s faculty, he was a Peter Paul Assistant Professor at Boston University. Dr. Bristol’s research is situated at the intersection of teacher policy and practice. Using qualitative methods, he explores three interrelated foci: (1) national, state, and local policies that enable and constrain teacher workplace experiences and retention; (2) district and school-based educator professional learning communities; (3) the intersection of race and gender in schools. Dr. Bristol’s research has appeared in peer-reviewed journals including Urban Education, the American Educational Research Journal, the Journal of Teacher Education, and Teachers College Record. He is currently co-editing (with Conra Gist) The Handbook of Research on Teachers of Color, which will be published by the American Educational Research Association (AERA).

Tina Trujillo

Dr. Trujillo uses tools from political science and critical policy studies to study the political dimensions of urban district reform, the instructional and democratic consequences of high-stakes testing and accountability policies for students of color and English Learners, and trends in urban educational leadership. Her recent research examines the instructional and political implications of private intermediary organizations as technical assistance providers for public school districts.

Janelle Scott

Prof. Scott’s research explores the relationship between education, policy, and equality of opportunity, and centers on three related policy strands: the racial politics of public education, the politics of school choice, marketization, and privatization, and the role of elite and community-based advocacy in shaping public education.

Jabari Mahiri

Jabari Mahiri is a Professor of Education and the William and Mary Jane Brinton Family Chair in Urban Education. He is Faculty Advisor for the Bay Area Writing Project, a board member of the National Writing Project, and a board member of the American Educational Research Association (2014 to 2017).  Professor Mahiri is author of Deconstructing Race: Multicultural Education Beyond the Color-Bind (2017); Digital Tools in Urban Schools: Mediating a Remix of Learning (2011); Out of Bounds: When Scholarship Athletes become Academic Scholars (2010) with Derek Van Rheenen; and, Shooting for Excellence: African American and Youth Culture in New Century Schools (1998). He is editor of The First Year of Teaching: Classroom Research to Improve Student Learning (2014) with Sarah Freedman; and, What They Don’t Learn in School: Literacy in the Lives of Urban Youth (2004). He also published a children’s book, The Day They Stole the Letter J.

Zeus Leonardo

Much of Prof. Leonardo work is interdisciplinary and draws insights from sociology, contemporary philosophy, and cultural studies. In particular, he engages critical theories to inform his analysis of the relationship between schooling and social relations, such as race, class, culture, and gender.

Kris Gutiérrez

Prof. Gutiérrez’s research examines learning in designed learning environments, with attention to students from non-dominant communities and English Learners. Her work on Third Spaces examines the affordances of hybrid and syncretic approaches to literacy, new media literacies, and STEM learning and the re-mediation of functional systems of learning.

Michael Dumas

Prof. Dumas’ research sits at the intersection(s) of the cultural politics of Black education, the cultural political economy of urban education, and the futurity of Black childhood(s).

Prudence Carter

Dr. Prudence Carter’s primary research and teaching agenda focuses on causes of and solutions to enduring social and cultural inequalities among social groups, especially in education and schooling. Her expertise ranges from issues of youth identity and race, class, and gender, urban poverty, social and cultural inequality, the sociology of education and mixed research methods. Specifically, she examines academic and mobility differences shaped by the effects of race, ethnicity, class, and gender in U.S. and global society.

Frank Worrell

My research interests include a focus on racial and ethnic identity and their relationship to achievement and risk status in the United States and in Trinidad and Tobago. I am also interested in developing instruments to measure these constructs.

Daniel Perlstein

My work focuses on the relationship of democratic aspirations and social inequality in the history of American education. This work has touched on issues ranging from gender and school violence to the racial politics of urban education and the pedagogical ideas of the African American freedom struggle. Current projects include a history of the evolving relationship of liberalism and American education.

Lisa García Bedolla

Lisa García Bedolla’s research interests center around the civic engagement, community activity, and political incorporation of racial/ethnic groups in the United States, with a particular focus on the intersection of race, class, and gender.

John Alba Cutler

I specialize in US Latino/a/x literatures, with special emphasis on modernism, poetry, and print culture. My current project, “Latinx Modernism and the Spirit of Latinoamericanismo,” examines the prodigious literary output of US Spanish-language serials in the early twentieth century. Daily newspapers, weekly magazines, literary reviews, and anarchist journals were the primary literary institutions for Latinx communities during this time period, publishing tens of thousands of original and reprinted poems, short stories, and crónicas. This project illuminates an entire field of Latinx modernism that these periodicals sponsored at the intersections of Latin American and US Latino/a/x identity and thought. My research has been supported by fellowships from the Alice B. Kaplan Institute for the Humanities, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and the American Council of Learned Societies. I’m currently a member of the PMLA Advisory Committee and the Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage Board of Directors.

Kathleen Donegan

Kathleen Donegan (Ph.D. American Studies, Yale University) writes and teaches about literature and culture in early America, from New World encounters through the first decades of the republic.  She is the author of Seasons of Misery: Catastrophe and Colonial Settlement in Early America (Penn, 2014), a book about the deeply unsettling history of early English colonial settlement in Native America.  It investigates how an acute relationship between suffering and violence in those crisis-ridden outposts produced a discourse of catastrophe – a literature of chaos and misery through which American coloniality can be understood anew.  Donegan’s current book project is entitled “The Spectral Plantation: The Other Worlds of Slavery.”  A second project is about colonial shipwreck narratives, entitled “Cast Away in the New World.”   In addition to surveys on early American literature, Donegan teaches courses on colonial Caribbean studies; early American women writers; captivity, slavery and piracy; the colonial Atlantic world; and racial formation in early America.  She also offers writing courses on the craft of the critical essay, and on narrative practice in scholarly writing.  In 2015, Donegan’s history of the Plymouth colony was featured in PBS’s The American Experience The Pilgrims: A Documentary History (dir. Ric Burns). She is the recipient of the Richard Beale Davis Award from Early American Literature, as well as Berkeley’s Distinguished Teaching Award, President’s Chair Fellowship, Hellman Fellowship, and Innovation in Teaching Award.  Since 2016, Donegan has served as Associate Dean of Arts and Humanities.

Hertha Sweet Wong

Prof. Wong writes about and teaches autobiography, Native American literatures, ethnic American literatures, and visual studies.

Susan Schweik

Scott Saul

My interests run to the great cultural watershed that was modernism in the arts — whether it took the form of William Carlos Williams’s poetry, Charlie Chaplin’s films, or Duke Ellington’s music — and to the starburst of creative activity that has followed up to the present. I’m especially interested in the connections between 20th-century artistic movements and 20th-century social movements — or, on the individual level, how particular artists are catalyzed by the history they are living through.

I generally teach courses in 20th-century American literature and cultural history, ranging from “The Culture of the Cold War” and “The Seventies” to “Fictions of Los Angeles,” “American Avant-Gardes” and “Race and Performance in the 20th-century U.S.”.

Steven Lee

My research interests include twentieth-century American literature, comparative ethnic studies, and Soviet and post-Soviet studies.  After graduating from Amherst College, I was among the inaugural group of Fulbright students to conduct research in the Central Asian Republics, where I compared Soviet Korean and Korean American literatures and histories.  I went on to receive my doctorate from Stanford’s Modern Thought and Literature program, spent a postdoctoral year at NYU’s Center for the United States and the Cold War, and began teaching at Berkeley in 2009. I am also an affiliated faculty member at the Center for Korean Studies and the Institute of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies.

Donna Jones

Professor Jones serves as Core Faculty for the Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory and the Science, Technology and Society Center. She is on the Advisory Board for the Interdisciplinary Studies Field Major, and is also affiliated with Gender and Women’s Studies. Specialties: African, Caribbean, Critial Theory, Narrative & the Novel, 20th and 21st Century British

Nadia Ellis

Prof. Ellis’ research traces the trajectories of literary and expressive cultures from the Caribbean to Britain to the United States and she is most intellectually at home at various intersections: between the diasporic and the queer; imperial identification and colonial resistance; performance and theory; migrancy and domesticity. She teaches classes on postcolonial literature and the city, black diasporic culture, queer theory, and US immigrant literature.

Stephen Best

Stephen Best’s scholarship encompasses a variety of fields and materials: American and African-American literature and culture, cinema and technology, rhetoric and the law, and critical theory. His research pursuits in the fields of American and African American criticism have been rather closely aligned with a broader interrogation of recent literary critical practice. To be specific, his interest in the critical nexus between slavery and historiography, in the varying scholarly and political preoccupations with establishing the authority of the slave past in black life, quadrates with an exploration of where the limits of historicism as a mode of literary study may lay, especially where that search manifests as an interest in alternatives to suspicious reading in the text-based disciplines. To this end, Professor Best has edited a number of special issues of the journal Representations (on whose board he sits) – “Redress” (with Saidiya Hartman), on theoretical and political projects to undo the slave past, “The Way We Read Now” (with Sharon Marcus), on the limits of symptomatic reading, and “Description Across Disciplines” (with Sharon Marcus and Heather Love), on disciplinary valuations of description as critical practice.

Bryan Wagner

My current research concerns violence and political modernization after slavery. I’m writing a book, Disturbing the Peace: Black Vagrancy and the Grounds of Race, which advances this inquiry by reading black popular culture of the late nineteenth century.

Poulomi Saha

My research and teaching agenda spans eastward and forward from the late 19th century decline of British colonial rule in the Indian Ocean through to the Pacific and the rise of American global power and domestic race relations in the 20th century. Engaging postcolonial studies, ethnic American literature, and gender and sexuality theory, I hope to map an expansive view of empire and of what constitutes Anglophone literature routed not primarily through Great Britain and Western Europe but rather through circuits of affiliation and encounter between Asia and the Americas.

Colleen Lye

Prof. Lye teaches courses on marxism, postcolonial theory, world systems theory, Asian American literature, Asian Anglophone literature, and world literature. Her current research project is on Asian American leftist movements and literature after 1968.

Abdul JanMohamed

Whereas The Death-Bound-Subject explored the central role of the threat of death (aka, lynching) on the formation of individual and collective subjects in slave and Jim Crow societies, Prof. JanMohamed’s current research, provisionally entitled Thick Love: Birthing the Death-Bound-Subject, focuses on black feminist neo-slave narratives that depict the vicissitudes of giving birth to and nurturing life in a culture organized around the production of death-bound-subjectivity.  More generally, his current research is animated by an attempt to theorize why and how people “allow” themselves to be coerced and exploited so thoroughly and relentlessly. Specialties: Critical Theory, African  American, Cultural Studies

Marcial González

Marcial González received a B.A. in English from Humboldt State University in 1992, an M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of Utah in 1994, and a Ph.D. in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University in 2000. He is the author of Chicano Novels and the Politics of Form: Race, Class, and Reification (U Michigan, 2009), and is currently writing a book on representations of migrant farm laborers in Chicana/o literature. He is also the co-editor of Dialectical Imaginaries: Materialist Approaches to U.S. Latino/a Literature in the Age of Neoliberalism (U Michigan, 2018). His current research and teaching interests include Chicana/o literature, migrant and immigrant literature, farm labor social movements, and Marxist literary theory. He also recently co-convened a faculty working group entitled “Critical Prison Studies in an Age of Mass Incarceration” at the Townsend Center for the Humanities. Professor González is the recipient of research fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, and the Mellon Foundation.

Elizabeth Abel

My research over the past decade has addressed the intersections of gender, race, and psychoanalysis. In my current project, I analyze the representational politics of the Jim Crow signs that traversed the United States for three quarters of a century, and of the documentary movement that produced our cultural memory of these signs. I also track the motivations and pathways of the current industry in reproducing racial signs that have become coveted items both for white supremacists and for African American collectors struggling to preserve segregation’s material history.

Danielle Zoe Rivera

Danielle Zoe Rivera is Assistant Professor in the department of Landscape Architecture + Environmental Planning. She joins the University of California Berkeley as part of a university-wide cluster hire focused on Climate Equity and Environmental Justice.

Rivera’s work examines environmental planning, urban design, and community development. Within these spaces, she focuses on issues of environmental justice and climate equity affecting low-income communities. Her current work leverages community-based research and design methods to identify and address environmental injustices affecting low-income communities throughout South Texas, the Bay Area, and Puerto Rico. She has conducted past research in Southeast Michigan, the Philadelphia region, and the Denver region. Rivera directs the Just Environments Lab, which seeks to center concerns of social justice and equity in discussions of the future of our environment.

Rivera’s work has been published by the Journal of the American Planning Association, Environment and Planning, Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, and International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. She holds a PhD in Urban Planning from the University of Michigan, a Master of Architecture from the University of Pennsylvania, and a Bachelor of Architecture from the Pennsylvania State University.

Elizabeth Hoover

My research focuses on Native American environmental health and food sovereignty movements. My first book  The River is In Us; Fighting Toxins in a Mohawk Community, (University of Minnesota Press, 2017) is an ethnographic exploration of Akwesasne Mohawks’ response to Superfund contamination and environmental health research. My second book project From ‘Garden Warriors’ to ‘Good Seeds;’ Indigenizing the Local Food Movement (University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming) explores Native American farming and gardening projects around the country: the successes and challenges faced by these organizations, the ways in which participants define and envision concepts like food sovereignty, the  importance of heritage seeds, the role of Native chefs in the food sovereignty movement, and convergences between the food sovereignty and anti-pipeline and anti-mining movements. I also co-edited, with Devon Mihesuah, Indigenous Food Sovereignty in the United States: Restoring Cultural Knowledge, Protecting Environments, and Regaining Health (University of Oklahoma Press, 2019). I have published articles about food sovereignty, environmental reproductive justice in Native American communities, the cultural impact of fish advisories on Native communities, tribal citizen science, and health social movements.

Christopher Schell

Dr. Chris Schell studies the intersections of society, ecology, and evolution to understand how wildlife (mainly mammalian carnivores) are rapidly adapting to life in cities. The work of the Schell lab combines behavioral, physiological, and genomic approaches to demonstrate the myriad consequences of historical and contemporary inequites on organismal, population, and community-level dynamics of wildlife. In addition, Dr. Schell and his lab leverage human dimensions and community-engaged data streams to decipher how wildlife adaptation and human perceptions create landscapes of risk that contribute to human-carnivore conflict. This interdisciplinary work requires integrating principles from the natural sciences with urban studies to address how systemic racism and oppression affect urban ecosystems, while simultaneously highlighting the need to environmental justice, civil rights, and equity as the bedrock of biological conservation and our fight against the climate crisis.

Jennifer M. Chacón

Jennifer M. Chacón is a Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law.  She was previously a Professor of Law at the UCLA School of Law, and the Chancellor’s Professor of Law, and the Senior Associate Dean for Administration at the University of California, Irvine, School of Law.  She is the co-author of the immigration law textbook Immigration Law and Social Justice, and the coauthor of a forthcoming book on the impact of shifting immigration policies on immigrant communities and organizations in Southern California from 2014 to 2017.  She has written dozens of articles, book chapters, and essays on immigration, criminal law, constitutional law, and citizenship issues.  Her research has been funded by the Russell Sage Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and the University of California.

Jeffrey M. Romm

Race and Resources: While there is a remarkable synchrony of sea-change shifts in American policies toward race and toward natural resources and environment, the two policy themes have been treated by scholars as if independent of one another. We have begun this path of study with the presumption that they are not independent of but are strongly related to one another. We have begun to explore these presumed relations through their joint impacts on land availability and access, labor opportunity and mobility, and the distribution and deployment of capital. Issues include the racial maldistribution of influence and opportunity on ‘public lands’; the impacts of environmental policies on access to residential and employment opportunity in metropolitan areas; means of resolving disparities between Native American treaty-based rights to natural resources and the jurisdictional frameworks that currently control these resources.

Michael Mascarenhas

Michael Mascarenhas is an environmental sociologist who examines questions regarding access to water in an era of neoliberal racism. His disciplinary fields include environmental justice and racism, postcolonial theory, and science and technology studies. His first book, Where the Waters Divide (Lexington Books, 2015), examines the market-based policies that produce inequitable water resource access for Canada’s First Nations. His second book, New Humanitarianism and the Crisis of Charity: Good Intentions on the Road to Help (Indiana University Press, 2017), applies a similar methodological approach to investigate the privatization of humanitarian aid following disasters. He is also the editor of a forthcoming anthology on environmental racism. Mascarenhas holds an MSc degree in forestry from the University of British Columbia (UBC) and a PhD in sociology from Michigan State University. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Applied Ethics at UBC and has held teaching appointments at Kwantlen Polytechnic University and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where he was an associate professor. His current research and book project, Thirsty for Environmental Justice, examines the water crises in the cities of Flint and Detroit. Mascarenhas was an expert witness at the Michigan Civil Rights Commission on the Flint Water Crisis, and an invited speaker to the National Academes of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s Committee on Designing Citizen Science to Support Science Learning.

Rachel Morello-Frosch

Race and class determinants of the distribution of health risks associated with air pollution among diverse communities in the United States.

Seth Holmes

Dr. Holmes is a cultural and medical anthropologist and physician whose work focuses broadly on social hierarchies, health disparities, and the ways in which perceptions of social difference naturalize and normalize these inequalities.

Claudia Carr

I am primarily involved in research concerning alternative types of rural development policies in terrestrial (especially drylands and river basin environments) and coastal and offshore resources in the ‘Third World.’ My approach to development problems, for a number of years in Africa but also in parts of Latin America and Asia, entails identifying the global, national and local processes involved in development (and conservation), including the constraints they present for state and locally based policy and practice. The international aid process provides a major focus of this work, largely because of its pervasive influence on development policy and practice in developing countries. Much of my research has involved ‘indigenous’ populations and their resources, from African agropastoral to coastal agro-fishing economic contexts, including in western Latin America and the southern Pacific region.

Natalia Brizuela

Natalia Brizuela is Associate Professor of Film & Media and Spanish & Portuguese where she is also affiliated with the Department of Gender & Women’s Studies, the DE in Critical Theory and the CRG. Her work focuses on photography, film and contemporary art, critical theory and aesthetics. She is the author of two photography books, Fotografia e Imperio. Paisagens para um Brasil Moderno (2012), and Depois da fotografia. Uma literatura fora de si (2014), and the co-author of two books that accompany exhibitions she curated, The Matter of Photography in the Americas (2018) and Photography at its Limits (2019). She has co-edited, among others, a special issue of the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies (2015) on Grete Stern and Horacio Coppola and a book of essays on Osvaldo Lamborghini, Y todo el resto es literatura
(2008). With Leticia Sabsay she is the co-editor of the book series “Critical South” (Polity Books) that both translates into English and commissions books of theory from the Global South.

Linda Williams (Emerita)

I am interested in the intersections of race, gender and sexuality in moving image culture.

Karl Britto

Professor Britto’s teaching and research interests include Francophone colonial and postcolonial literatures of Vietnam, Africa and the Caribbean.

Debarati Sanyal

19th-century literature and culture; 20th-21st century studies; postwar French and Francophone intellectual culture; Holocaust studies; transcultural memory studies; critical refugee studies.

Églantine Colon

Areas of inquiry include the intersections between literary creation and critical theory; theories and practices of care, precarity and the community; space and politics in neo-colonial and neo-capitalist contexts; postmodernisms and their current renewals.

Courtney Morris

Courtney Desiree Morris is a visual/conceptual artist and an assistant professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She teaches courses on critical race theory, feminist theory, black social movements in the Americas, women’s social movements in Latin America and the Caribbean, as well as race and environmental politics in the African Diaspora. She is a social anthropologist and is currently completing a book entitled To Defend this Sunrise: Black Women’s Activism and the Geography of Race in Nicaragua, which examines how black women activists have resisted historical and contemporary patterns of racialized state violence, economic exclusion, territorial dispossession, and political repression from the 19th century to the present. She is currently developing a new project on the racial politics of energy production and dispossession in the US Gulf South and South Africa. Her work has been published in American Anthropologist, the Bulletin of Latin American Research, the Journal of Women, Gender, and Families of Color, make/shift: feminisms in motion, and Asterix. To see her art work visit www.courtneydesireemorris.com.

Eric A. Stanley

Professor Stanley‘s research and teaching work with radical trans/queer critique, anti-colonial feminisms, and critical theory. They are currently completing their first manuscript Atmospheres of Violence that argues racialized anti-trans/queer violence, including direct attacks, prisons, suicide, and HIV/AIDS, is foundational to, and not an aberration of, western modernity. They are also working on two other projects, the first on nonsovereignty and the trans/queer people involved in Left insurgent underground activities in the 1970s and 1980s, and a new project on geographies of dislocation and trans resistance, focusing on the Bay Area.

Leslie Salzinger

Prof. Salzinger is an ethnographer, focused on gender, economic sociology, globalization, and feminist theory. Much of her research is in Latin America. Her primary research interests lie in the cultural constitution of economic processes, and in the creation of subjectivities within political economies.

Laura Nelson

Prof. Nelson’s current research project is a study of breast cancer as a medical, cultural, personal, environmental, political and transnational phenomenon in South Korea.  She is also in the early stages of a project looking at policies pertaining to the children of immigrant brides in South Korea.

Minoo Moallem

Minoo Moallem is Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at UC Berkeley. She is the author of Between Warrior Brother and Veiled Sister. Islamic Fundamentalism and the Cultural Politics of Patriarchy in Iran, University of California Press, 2005. She is also the co-editor (with Caren Kaplan and Norma Alarcon) of Between Woman and Nation. Nationalisms, Transnational Feminisms and The State, Duke University Press, 1999, and the guest editor of a special issue of Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East on Iranian Immigrants, Exiles and Refugees.

Mel Y. Chen

Prof. Chen’s research and teaching interests include queer and gender theory, animal studies, critical race theory, disability studies, and critical linguistics. In the Fall of 2009, Prof. Chen convened “Species Spectacles”, a U.C. Humanities Research Institute Residential Research Group focused on animality, sexuality and race. Prof. Chen’s short film, Local Grown Corn (2007), explores interweavings of immigration, childhood, illness and friendship; it has played in both asian and queer film festivals.

Paola Bacchetta

transnational feminist theory; gender, sexuality, race, religion; nationalisms (especially Hindu nationalism); religious, ethnic and political conflict; social movements (feminist, lesbian, anti-racism, and right-wing); space; postcolonial theory; qualitative methods (discourse analysis and ethnography). Geographic areas of specialization outside the United States: India and France. (Read more about Professor Bacchetta in the Fall 2003 issue of FaultLines.)

Brandi Thompson Summers

I am an assistant professor of Geography and Global Metropolitan Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. My research engages theoretical themes that cut across multiple domains of social life. I build on epistemological and methodological insights from cultural and urban geography, urban sociology, African American studies, and media studies by examining the cultural, political, and economic dynamics by which race and space are reimagined and reordered. My first book, Black in Place: The Spatial Aesthetics of Race in a Post-Chocolate City(link is external) (UNC Press), explores how aesthetics and race converge to locate or map blackness in Washington, D.C. In it, I demonstrate the way that competing notions of blackness structure efforts to raise capital and develop land in the gentrifying city. My current book project, tentatively titled Routes of Race, Resistance, and the Geographies of Belonging in Oakland, California, is an interdisciplinary study that examines the complex ways in which uses of space and placemaking practices inform productions of knowledge and power. The study examines representations and experiences of space, place, and landscape in Oakland across historical contexts

Jake Kosek

Cultural politics of nature and difference; cultural geography, science and technology studies; critical race theory; critical cartography; biopolitics; human and the non-human; and environmental politics

Sharad Chari

Geography as history of the present and as Earth/world-writing, social theory, political economy, development, agrarian studies, labor and work, racial/sexual capitalism, Black radical tradition, biopolitical struggle, oceanic humanities, photography, South Asia, South Africa, Indian Ocean.

Jovan Scott Lewis

Jovan Scott Lewis (Ph.D., London School of Economics) is an economic anthropologist who works in the field sites of Tulsa, Oklahoma and Montego Bay, Jamaica. His research examines the cultural mechanisms, institutional forms, and social practices through which an unequal living of, and coping with, the economy, its failures and contingencies are understood. Other interests include economic geography, constructions and infrastructures of poverty, inequality, race (blackness), economy, and the market; the Caribbean (esp. Jamaica) and African-American communities.

Beatriz Manz (Emerita)

Interested in Mayan populations, refugees, migration to the US, Latin America; Peasantry; Migrations; Social movements; Human Rights; Political/Social/Ethnic Conflict

Deniz Göktürk

Prof. Göktürk’s publications include a book on literary and cinematic imaginations of America in early twentieth-century German culture: Künstler, Cowboys, Ingenieure: Kultur- und mediengeschichtliche Studien zu deutschen Amerika-Texten 1912-1920 (1998) as well as seminal articles on migration, culture, and cinema.

Jeroen Dewulf

Prof. Dewulf’s research interests are as diverse as Dutch and Portuguese (post)colonial literature and history, transatlantic slave trade, Low Countries studies, Swiss literature and culture and European politics in general.

Rebecca Herman

My research and writing examine modern Latin American history in a global context.

My first book, forthcoming from Oxford University Press, reconstructs the history of U.S. military basing in Latin America during World War II – through high diplomacy and on-the-ground examinations of race, labor, sex and law – to reveal the origins and impact of inter-American “security cooperation” on domestic and international politics in the region. I have also authored past and forthcoming articles and book chapters on the global politics of anti-racism, the Cuban literacy campaign, the Brazilian labor justice system, and U.S.-Latin American relations.

I am currently working on a new book project on Antarctica, Latin America and the World.

Prior to entering academia, I spent several years in Argentina, Chile, Bolivia and Brazil working as a freelance translator, researcher and documentarian. Before joining the faculty at Berkeley, I was Assistant Professor of International Studies and Latin American Studies at the University of Washington, Seattle. I have received fellowships and awards from the Mellon Foundation, the Smithsonian Institution, the Social Science Research Council, and the Council on Library and Information Resources, among others.

I received my Ph.D. in History from Berkeley and my B.A. in Literature and History from Duke.

Bernadette Pérez

I am a historian of the United States. I focus particularly on the histories of Latinx and Indigenous peoples in the West. My work is situated at the intersection of multiple subfields of history, from race and environment to labor, migration, and colonialism. In other words, I study empire and capitalism in action.

Migrant sugar beet workers are at the heart of my current work. In my manuscript, I follow corporate sugar into southeastern Colorado at the turn of the twentieth century and trace its efforts to hold diverse working communities within a highly unequal and hierarchical land and labor regime for the better part of a century. In doing so, I unearth the long and entangled histories of Indigenous, Mexican, Asian, and white peoples in a space structured by U.S. expansion, Indian removal, and anti-Blackness. My book reveals the fundamental role that occupying, transforming, and controlling the land played in the evolution of the American state and racial capitalism in the post-Civil War period.

Dylan Penningroth

Dylan C. Penningroth specializes in African American history and in U.S. socio-legal history.  Penningroth is currently working on a study of African Americans’ encounter with law from the Civil War to the modern civil rights movement. Combining legal and social history, the study explores the practical meaning of legal rights for black life. His next project is a study of the legacies of slavery in colonial Ghana.

Elena Schneider

Elena Schneider is a historian of Latin America and the Atlantic World.  Her research explores the ways that war, trade, and slavery integrated the eighteenth-century Caribbean and Atlantic across regional and what would later become national boundaries.

Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers

African-American history, the history of American Slavery, slavery and the law, the history of women, women and early American law

Brian DeLay

US and the World; American West; 19th-century Americas; transnational history; US-Mexico Borderlands; Native American History; International Arms Trade

Mark Brilliant

Waldo E. Martin

Modern African American Cultural Politics: 1945-1980. Examining the cultural impact and significance of the Civil Rights and Black Power struggles on the Black Freedom Struggle specifically, and postwar American Culture more generally.

David A. Hollinger

Impact of foreign missionary project (2/3 female) on American culture and politics; theories of race and identity.

Tyrone Hayes

My research focuses on the role of steroid hormones in amphibian development and I conduct both laboratory and field studies in the U.S. and Africa. The two main areas of interest are metamorphosis and sex differentiation, but I am also interested in growth (larval and adult) and hormonal regulation of aggressive behavior.

Rhiannon Welch

Rhiannon Noel Welch works on modern Italian literature, film, and critical theory. Her first book, Vital Subjects: Race and Biopolitics in Italy, reads a range of canonical and lesser-known texts through the lens of biopolitics in order to demonstrate how race and colonialism have long been central to Italian modernity and national culture, rather than a fascist aberration or a contemporary phenomenon resulting from immigration.

Neil Henry (Emeritus)

Professor Henry launched an award winning digital news initiative originally funded by the Ford Foundation in which J-School students in the program’s core news reporting classes are producing local news content for neglected Bay Area communities. The digital sites include OaklandNorth, Richmond Confidential, and Mission Loc@l, winner of a 2009 Webby Award for Internet Excellence. These projects helped lead the School to a founding partnership in 2010 with the Hellman Family Foundation in the Bay Area News Project, a non-profit online news operation dedicated to providing greater public interest journalism to Bay Area communities.

Jon Else

Jon Else produced and directed the documentaries The Day After Trinity: J. Robert Oppenheimer and the Atomic Bomb, Yosemite: The Fate of Heaven, A Job at Ford’s part of the PBS series The Great Depression, Cadillac Desert: Water and the Transformation of Nature, Sing Faster: The Stagehands’ Ring Cycle, and Open Outcry. He was series producer and cinematographer for Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years. Else served as cinematographer on documentaries for PBS, BBC, ABC, MTV and HBO, including the BBC/PBS History of Rock and Roll, the Paramount/MTV feature documentary Tupac: Resurrection and Afghanistan: Hell of a Nation, and numerous commercials and music videos. He is directing a feature documentary about nuclear weapons.

Bill Drummond

William J. Drummond’s career includes stints at The (Louisville) Courier-Journal, where he covered the civil rights movement, and the Los Angeles Times, where he was a local reporter, then bureau chief in New Delhi and Jerusalem and later a Washington correspondent. Drummond was appointed a White House Fellow in 1976 by President Gerald R. Ford, worked briefly for Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and eventually became associate press secretary to President Jimmy Carter. In 1977 he joined NPR and became the founding editor of Morning Edition. He joined the Berkeley faculty in July, 1983.

Lydia Chavez (Emteritus)

Lydia Chavez started as a reporter for the Albuquerque Tribune, later moving on to Time magazine, Los Angeles Times and The New York Times, where she served as El Salvador and South American bureau chief. In 2005, ChÌÁvez and her students collaborated to publish Capitalism, God and A Good Cigar: Cuba Enters the Twenty-First Century (Duke University Press). And in 1998, ChÌÁvez published The Color Bind: California’s Battle Against Affirmative Action, which won the Leonard Silk Award (UC Press). She has also written op-ed pieces for The New York Times, Los Angeles Times and San Francisco Examiner and magazine pieces for The New York Times and Los Angeles Times Sunday Magazines and George magazine. She holds a bachelor’s degree in comparative literature from the University of California, Berkeley, a master’s degree from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, a Graduate Diploma in Art History and a master’s degree in Art History from the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. She is the founder and executive editor of Mission Local, a news site covering the Mission District that began at Berkeley in the fall of 2008 and became independent in the summer of 2014.

Asad Rahim

Asad Rahim is an Assistant Professor of Law. He writes in the areas of constitutional law, critical race theory and employment discrimination. Rahim’s research has been funded by the National Science Foundation and the American Bar Foundation. His publications have appeared or are forthcoming in California Law Review, UCLA Law Review and the Annual Review of Law and Social Science

Abbye Atkinson

Abbye Atkinson’s research focuses on the law of debtors and creditors as it affects economically disenfranchised communities. Her work is forthcoming in the Columbia Law Review and has been published in the Stanford Law Review, the Vanderbilt Law Review, the Arizona Law Review, and the Michigan Journal of Race and Law.

Khiara Bridges

Khiara M. Bridges is a professor of law at UC Berkeley School of Law. She has written many articles concerning, race, class, reproductive rights, and the intersection of the three. Her scholarship has appeared or will soon appear in the Harvard Law Review, Stanford Law Review, the Columbia Law Review, the California Law Review, and the Virginia Law Review, among others. She is also the author of three books: Reproducing Race: An Ethnography of Pregnancy as a Site of Racialization (2011), The Poverty of Privacy Rights (2017), and Critical Race Theory: A Primer (2019). She is a coeditor of a reproductive justice book series that is published under the imprint of the University of California Press

Victoria Plaut

Victoria Plaut, a social and cultural psychologist, joined the Berkeley Law faculty in 2010-2011 from the University of Georgia where she was Assistant Professor of Psychology. She also previously taught at the College of the Holy Cross, in Worcester, Massachusetts, before joining the UGA faculty in 2005. She was a visitor at Berkeley Law in 2009-2010. Dr. Plaut’s research on diversity, culture, and inclusion aims to address the challenges and opportunities of working, living, and learning in diverse environments. Her recent projects on diversity include studies related to diversity climate, diversity resistance, perceptions of inclusion, colorblind vs. multicultural models of diversity, models of deafness and disability, and gender diversity and recruitment, among others. She also has a related line of work on cultural psychology, including cultural models of success, self, well-being, relationship, and law. At Berkeley Law, Dr. Plaut’s research and classes focus on incorporating empirical psychological research related to issues of diversity and culture into the design of legal institutions and organizations.

Taeku Lee

My primary interests are in racial/ethnic politics, public opinion/survey research, and social movements/political participation. I am currently at work on several projects that examine the concept of “race” and “identity” and their consequences for contemporary politics in the US.

Kathryn Abrams

Before entering academia, Kathy Abrams clerked for Judge Frank M. Johnson of the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals. She has taught at the law schools at Boston University, Indiana University-Bloomington, Harvard University and Northwestern University. Most recently, she was Professor of Law and Associate Professor of Ethics and Public Life at Cornell University. While at Cornell, she served as Director of the Women’s Studies Program, and won several awards for teaching and for service to women. She joined the Boalt faculty in 2001.

Abrams teaches feminist jurisprudence, voting rights and constitutional law. Her scholarship has explored questions of employment discrimination, minority vote dilution, campaign finance, constitutional law, and law and the emotions, but it has focused most centrally on feminist jurisprudence. Within this area, Abrams has written on feminist methodology and epistemology, the jurisprudence of sexual harassment, and cultural and theoretical constructions of women’s agency.

Abrams’ recent publications include “Fighting Fire with Fire: Rethinking the Role of Disgust in Hate Crimes” in the California Law Review (2002), “Subordination and Agency in Sexual Harassment Law” in Directions in Sexual Harassment Law (2003), “Extraordinary Measures: Protesting Rule of Law Violations after Bush v. Gore” in Law & Philosophy (2002), and “The Legal Subject in Exile” in the Duke Law Journal (2001).

Sarah Song

Sarah Song is a political theorist with a special interest in issues of citizenship and migration. She teaches in the Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program at Berkeley Law School and is also affiliated with the Political Science Department. She is the Director of the Kadish Center for Morality, Law, & Public Affairs.

Dylan Penningroth

Dylan C. Penningroth specializes in African American history and in U.S. socio-legal history.  Penningroth is currently working on a study of African Americans’ encounter with law from the Civil War to the modern civil rights movement. Combining legal and social history, the study explores the practical meaning of legal rights for black life. His next project is a study of the legacies of slavery in colonial Ghana.

Sonia Katyal

Prof. Katyal’s scholarly work focuses on intellectual property, art law, civil rights (including gender, race and sexuality), property theory, and technology/new media. Her past projects have studied the relationship between copyright enforcement and surveillance; the impact of artistic activism on trademark law, commerce and advertising; and the intersection between copyright law and gender with respect to fan-generated works. Katyal also works on issues relating to intellectual property and indigenous people’s rights, with a special focus on cultural property and trademark law in the United States and abroad. Her current projects focus on the intersection between technology, internet access and civil/human rights, with a special focus on the right to information, and a variety of projects on the intersection between gender, sexuality, and the commons.

Russell Robinson

Prof. Robinson’s scholarly and teaching interests include anti-discrimination law, race and sexuality, law and psychology, constitutional law, and media and entertainment law.

Jonathan Simon

Prof. Simon teaches criminal law, an advanced criminal law seminar on mass incarceration, sociology of law, and several classes in the undergraduate legal studies program (foundations of legal studies; prisons; punishment, culture and society). His scholarship concerns the role of crime and criminal justice in governing contemporary societies.

Ian Haney López

Prof. Haney López’s current research emphasizes the connection between racial divisions in society and growing wealth inequality in the United States. His most recent book, Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class, lays bare how conservative politicians exploit racial pandering to convince many voters to support policies that ultimately favor the very rich and hurt everyone else.

Laurel Fletcher

Prof. Fletcher is active in the areas of human rights, humanitarian law, international criminal justice, and transitional justice. As director of the International Human Rights Law Clinic, she utilizes an interdisciplinary, problem-based approach to human rights research, advocacy, and policy.

Catherine Fisk

Prof. Fisk’s recent articles cover a wide range of subjects including police unions, the history and current experiences of unionized writers in the entertainment industry, labor protest and the First Amendment, the governance of worker center and labor unions, class action employment claims, and the theory and methods of sociolegal history. Her current book project, a legal history of lawyers for the labor movement in the mid-twentieth century, examines the challenges faced by lawyers and labor unions as the courts and Congress steadily increased restrictions on labor protest between 1940 and 1990.

Christopher Edley, Jr.

Christopher Edley, Jr. was dean of the U.C. Berkeley School of Law from 2004 to 2013, after 23 years as a Harvard Law professor. His academic work is in administrative law, civil rights, education policy, and domestic public policy generally. Professor Edley has moved between academia and public service, each enriching the other and together giving him broad familiarity with many areas of public policy. He served in White House policy and budget positions under Presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. In Clinton’s OMB, he oversaw budgets and legislative initiatives for five cabinet departments and over 40 independent agencies, with budget responsibility totaling in the hundreds of billions of dollars. As senior counsel to Clinton, he directed a government-wide review of affirmative action programs. Edley held senior positions in five presidential campaigns, including senior policy adviser for Barack Obama; he then served on Obama’s Transition Board with responsibility for Education, Immigration and Health. More recently, Edley co-chaired the congressionally chartered National Commission on Education Equity and Excellence (2011-13). The Commission’s charge was to revisit the 1983 report, A Nation at Risk, and recommend future directions for reform; he chairs the follow-on effort, For Each & Every Child. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, National Academy of Public Administration, Council of Foreign Relations, Gates Foundation’s National Programs Advisory Panel, and has served on many panels for the National Research Council. He continues as a Berkeley Professor.

Lauren Edelman

Prof. Edelman’s research addresses the interplay between organizations and their legal environments, focusing on employers’ responses to and constructions of civil rights laws, workers’ mobilization of legal rights, the impact of management practices on law and legal institutions, dispute resolution in organizations, school rights, empirical critical race studies, empirical sociolegal studies, and employer accommodations of disabilities in the workplace.

Catherine Albiston

Professor Albiston’s research addresses the relationship between law and social change through a variety of empirical projects. Her current study of more than 200 public interest law organizations investigates how variation in strategy, structure and mission among public interest law organizations relate to access to justice. Her other work examines institutional factors that influence law students’ commitment to public interest careers, bias against workers based on race, gender, and caretaker status, and gender and racial disparities in STEM faculty hiring as well as the institutional factors that mitigate these disparities.

Leti Volpp

My research centers on legal understandings of the relationship between culture, migration and identity, and on theories of citizenship. I am in particular interested in Asian American racialization and in the culturalization of racism, especially as it is expressed through concern about cultural forms of gendered subordination.

Richard Rhodes

Algonquian languages (Ojibwe/Ottawa, Cree), Mixe-Zoquean languages (Sayuleño), mixed languages (Métchif), language contact, language spreads, pronominal systems

Leanne Hinton

My primary research interests revolve around language death and language revitalization, and thus the politics of language. Since race is a very important issue in language politics and language death, I have frequently been involved in language issues that involve race, such as the ebonics controversy, Official English, bilingual education, and laws affecting immigrant languages and Native American languages. I have also done research on language and gender, and run classes where many of the term papers are about language and gender, language and race, or an intersection of both. I am working on a book called “The American Languages,” related to a class I teach by the same name, which will have a number of chapters on language and race and/or gender. (Read more about Professor Hinton in the Spring 2003 issue of Faultlines.)

Alice Agogino

Alice M. Agogino is the Roscoe and Elizabeth Hughes Professor of Mechanical Engineering and directs several computational and design research and instructional laboratories at Cal. She received a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of New Mexico, M.S. in Mechanical Engineering (1978) from the University of California at Berkeley, and Ph.D. from the Department of Engineering-Economic Systems at Stanford University (1984). She has authored over 120 scholarly publications in the areas of: MEMS/Mechatronics design methods; nonlinear optimization; intelligent learning systems; multi-objective and strategic product design; probabilistic modeling; intelligent control and manufacturing; graphics, multimedia and computer-aided design; design databases; digital libraries; artificial intelligence and decision and expert systems; and gender & technology.

T. Carlis Roberts

Prof. Roberts’ research investigates the connections between sound and social identities, centering on marginalized histories of popular and folk music in the Americas. Specific interests include: interracial musical collaboration, music of enslaved Africans in the U.S. and Caribbean, intercultural percussion performance, women’s drumming communities, diasporic connections in African American and Afro-Caribbean folkloric traditions, queer and trans popular music making, and the technology and politics of spiritual musical practice.

Thomas Biolsi

Race-Making, Indian Law & Policy, Governmentality

Shari Huhndorf

Interdisciplinary Native American studies, literary and visual culture, cultural studies, gender studies, American studies

Beth H. Piatote

I am currently completing the manuscript, Domestic Subjects: Gender, Citizenship, and Law in Native American Literature, which focuses on legal discourses in the literary works of the following indigenous writers: E. Pauline Johnson, John Oskison, Mourning Dove, Alice Callahan, and D’Arcy McNickle. I am completing a short fiction collection called Beading Lesson and Other Stories, and continue to write translations of Ni:mi:pu: literary, liturgical, and historical texts. My second academic book project, funded in part by a grant from the Hellman Family Foundation, will focus on Nez Perce texts and translation.

Cecilia H. Mo

Cecilia Hyunjung Mo is an assistant professor of political science at University of California, Berkeley. She is also an assistant professor of public policy (by courtesy) at UC Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy. She specializes in behavioral political economy, comparative political behavior, the political economy of development, and social policy research. She focuses on significant contemporary challenges to development and moral issues of today like cultivating democratic citizenship, understanding and addressing the negative consequences of rising inequality, combatting modern day slavery, and reducing prejudice. Her research agenda is interdisciplinary and lies at the intersection of political science, economics, and psychology.

Desmond Jagmohan

Desmond Jagmohan is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. He specializes in the history of American and African American political thought, American intellectual history, and the history of political thought. His research concerns political and moral agency under conditions of extreme oppression. He is completing his first book, Dark Virtues: Booker T. Washington’s Tragic Realism(under contract with Princeton University Press), which draws on several years of archival research to recover Washington as a virtue theorist of the oppressed. His second book will read Harriet Jacobs’s slave narrative as a work of moral and political theory that grounds the wrong of slavery in property rights in another person.  His work has been published in Political Theory, Perspectives on Politics, Politics, Groups, and Identities, Contemporary Political Theory, and Boston Review.

Wendy Brown

Professor Brown’s fields of interest include the history of political theory, nineteenth and twentieth century Continental theory, critical theory and theories of contemporary capitalism.  She is best known for intertwining the insights of Marx, Nietzsche, Weber, Freud, Frankfurt School theorists, Foucault, and contemporary Continental philosophers to critically interrogate formations of power, political identity, citizenship, and political subjectivity in contemporary liberal democracies.  In recent years, her scholarship has focused on neoliberalism and the political formations to which it gives rise.

Taeku Lee

My primary interests are in racial/ethnic politics, public opinion/survey research, and social movements/political participation. I am currently at work on several projects that examine the concept of “race” and “identity” and their consequences for contemporary politics in the US.

Jason Okonofua

Mindsets; stereotypes; education-based motivation; large-scale psychological intervention; social cognition; teacher-student relationships; school-to-prison pipeline; discipline in K-12 schooling

Kaiping Peng

The central theme of my current research interests is the intricate relationship between human cultures and basic psychological processes, with focuses on two lines of research: 1) culture and social cognition, studying cultural effects on causal inference, judgment and decision making, 2) cultural and cognitive aspects of ethnicity and race, including the nature, function and centrality of white, black and Asian identities.

Ann Kring

My broad research interests are in emotion and psychopathology, with a particular emphasis on schizophrenia and depression. One ongoing study is examining emotional responding in women with schizophrenia. A second major focus of my research is on the origins and consequences of individual differences in emotional expressivity. Ongoing studies seek to answer questions such as under what circumstances and in the presence of what individuals might men and women differ in the expression of specific emotions; how social context modifies dispositional expressive tendencies, and the ways in which men and women use emotion to negotiate status and power differences.

Dacher Keltner

Dacher’s research interests focus on three broad questions. A first pertains to the determinants and consequences of power and status. A second focuses on how individual differences in emotion, say the tendency towards compassion or awe, shape the individual’s relationships life course. A final interest has to do with characterizing the forms and functions of the different positive emotions, including awe, love, gratitude, compassion.

Stephen Hinshaw

I am interested, among many topics, in the development of psychopathology (particularly attention deficits, antisocial behavior, and depression) in girls and women. Our longitudinal databases also include diverse samples from an ethnic and racial perspective. I am also pursuing research on the stigmatization of mental illness across diverse cultures.

Amani M. Allen

Amani M. Allen (formerly Nuru-Jeter) is Associate Professor of Community Health Sciences and Epidemiology at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Public Health, where her research focuses on race and socioeconomic health disparities and the measurement and study of racism as a social determinant of health.

Denise Herd

Denise Herd is an Associate Professor of Public Health at UC Berkeley. Herd’s scholarship centers on racialized disparities in health outcomes, spanning topics as varied as images of drugs and violence in rap music, drinking and drug use patterns, social movements, and the impact of corporate targeting and marketing on popular culture among African American youth. In addition to her extensive scholarship in public health, Herd has also served as associate dean at UC Berkeley’s School of Public Health for seven years.

Osagie K. Obasogie

Prof. Obasogie’s research and writing is on bioethics, with a focus on the social, ethical, and legal implications of new reproductive and genetic technologies. Obasogie’s research also looks at the past and present roles of science in both constructing racial meanings and explaining racial disparities. He has a particular interest in developing legal mechanisms that can create the conditions for eliminating health disparities.

Susan Ivey

Dr. Ivey is interested in cardiovascular risk factors in vulnerable populations especially immigrants, and women especially. She also is interested in local and national policy change to improve access to health care services and improve overall health status.

Ellora Derenoncourt

Ellora Derenoncourt is a labor economist and economic historian whose work focuses on inequality. Her research uses quasi-experimental methods and original data collection to understand the evolution of racial inequality in the US over the 20^th century. Her recent studies have examined northern backlash against the Great Migration and ensuing reductions in black upward mobility and the role of federal minimum wage policy in accelerating racial earnings convergence during the Civil Rights Era. She has also written on the historical origins of global inequality and Atlantic slavery’s impact on European and British economic development.

Claire Montialoux

My research interests include topics in labor economics, political economy, and economic history. I study policies aimed at reducing deep-rooted inequalities in the labor market, with a particular focus on minimum wages and racial earnings gaps.

Steven Raphael

Prof. Raphael’s research focuses on the economics of low-wage labor markets, housing, and the economics of crime and corrections.  His most recent research focuses on the social consequences of the large increases in U.S. incarceration rates and racial disparities in criminal justice outcomes.  Raphael also works on immigration policy, research questions pertaining to various aspects of racial inequality, the economics of labor unions, social insurance policies, homelessness, and low-income housing.

Rucker Johnson

As a labor and health economist, Prof. Johnson’s work considers the role of poverty and inequality in affecting life chances. He has focused on such topics as the long-run impacts of school quality on educational attainment and socioeconomic success, including the effects of desegregation, school finance reform, and Head Start.  He has investigated the determinants of intergenerational mobility; the societal consequences of incarceration; effects of maternal employment patterns on child well-being; and the socioeconomic determinants of health disparities over the life course, including the roles of childhood neighborhood conditions and residential segregation.

Jesse Rothstein

Economics of education; local public finance; school and teacher accountability and performance measurement; discrimination; inequality; affirmative action; black-white gaps in educational and economic outcomes; tax and transfer policy.

Dan Kammen

Science and technology policy focused on energy, development and environmental management. Technology and policy questions in developing nations, particularly involving: the linkages between energy, health, and the environment; technology transfer and diffusion; household energy management; renewable energy; women; minority groups. Global environmental change including deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions and resource consumption. Environmental and technological risk. Management of innovation and energy R&D policy. Geographic expertise: Africa; Latin America.

Fumi Okiji Okiji

I arrived at the academy by way of the London jazz scene in which I took an active part as a vocalist and improvisor. I work across black study, critical theory, and sound and music studies. My research and teaching looks to black expression for ways to understand modern and contemporary life, which is to say, I explore works and practices for what they can provide by way of social theory. For instance, my book Jazz as Critique: Adorno and Black Expression Revisited (Stanford University Press, 2018) is a sustained engagement with Theodor Adorno’s idea concerning the critical potential of art. I propose that the socio-musical play of jazz is not representative of the individualistic and democratic values, the music is most readily associated with. The book centers blackness as a more appropriate analytic through which to understand its social significance.

Samera Esmeir

My research and teaching are at the intersection of legal and political thought, Middle Eastern history and colonial and post-colonial studies. One ongoing intellectual focus has been to examine how late-modern colonialism has introduced liberal juridical logics and grammars that in turn shaped modalities of political praxis, and how those have persisted in the post-colonial era and have traveled in different countries in the Middle East. My first book, Juridical Humanity: A Colonial History (Stanford University Press, 2012), pursues this problem in relation to colonial Egypt and examines how colonial juridical powers have reconfigured the concept of the human during the late-modern colonial era by bonding the human to the law. I am currently working on a second book project also guided by the intersectionality of law and politics. Titled The Struggle that Remains, this book in progress tracks the modern entry of the word international into the English language, theorizes its emergence as a contending signifier of the world (in legal and political discourse), explores its reconfiguration of horizons of struggle, in particular in how it has contributed to shifting the relationship between war and revolution, and probes the struggle that remains in excess. I also have ongoing interest in questions of destruction, natural, legal, and political. I have been pursuing these questions in preparation for a project on natural catastrophes and colonial annihilation.

Nasser Zakariya

My research interests concern science, narrative and documentary; topics in the history and philosophy of mathematics and physics; and science, law and race. My current manuscript centers on the emergence of the so-called “scientific epic” as one among a set of possible frames or genres for synthesizing branches of knowledge according to a narrative, historical structure.

Marianne Constable

Legal rhetoric and philosophy, Theories of interpretation, Social and political thought, Anglo-American legal traditions Continental philosophy, Contemporary law and society

Shannon Jackson

My research is located in performance studies and American studies from the late 19th century to contemporary, focusing on the role of social and aesthetic performances in movements for social change and in the history of higher education. My current project considers the infrastructural politics of art practices that respond to materially fraught issues such as housing, the environment, disability, childcare, labor inequity, and social welfare.

Linda Burton

Professor Linda M. Burton begins her term as dean of Berkeley Social Welfare in September 2019. Previously, Burton was the James B. Duke Professor of Sociology and director of the Center for Child and Family Policy at Duke University. In her role as dean of Social Sciences at Duke University’s Trinity College of Arts and Sciences, she was responsible for handling all matters relative to 239 faculty members in 14 departments and programs, including African/African American Studies, Economics, History, Political Science, and Women’s Studies. She simultaneously co-directed the undergraduate program on International Comparative Studies, was co-chair of the university’s Task Force on Bias and Hate Issues, and served on the university’s union bargaining team in negotiations with the Service Employees’ International Union (SEIU) on behalf of Duke’s adjunct professors. Prior to joining Duke, she was a faculty member at Penn State for over 20 years and served as director of its Center for Human Development and Family Research in Diverse Contexts from 1998 to 2006. She holds a PhD in sociology from the University of Southern California.

Erin M. Kerrison

Prof. Erin M. Kerrison’s work extends from a legal epidemiological framework, wherein law and legal institutions operate as social determinants of health. Specifically, through varied agency partnerships, her mixed-method research agenda investigates the impact that compounded structural disadvantage, concentrated poverty and state supervision has on service delivery, substance abuse, violence and other health outcomes for individuals and communities marked by criminal justice intervention.

Tina Sacks

Fields of special interest include racial disparities in health; social determinants of health; race, class and gender; and poverty and inequality.

Kurt Organista

HIV prevention and the treatment of depression with Mexican/Latino migrants in the US.

Julian Chow

My research has centered on two substantive areas: first, to study social service delivery and program development for ethnic minority and especially immigrant populations within a community context. Second, to understand the factors that are attributable to the differential use of human and social services among ethnic minority populations. My interest is to seek ways to improve access to services and to provide better community care for ethnic minority and immigrant groups.

Mara Loveman

Mara Loveman is a political and comparative-historical sociologist with broad interests in ethnoracial politics, nationalism, and the state.  Her research interests also include the sociology of development, the demography of ethnoracial difference and inequality, and human rights, with a regional focus on Latin America. Mara Loveman joined the UC-Berkeley sociology department in Fall of 2013. From 2003-2013, she was a faculty member in the sociology department at UW-Madison. She earned her M.A. and Ph.D. in Sociology from UCLA and her B.A. in Political Economy of Industrial Societies, Latin American Studies, and Spanish and Portuguese from UC-Berkeley.

Christopher Muller

I study the political economy of incarceration in the United States from Reconstruction to the present. I am particularly interested in how agrarian transitions, migration, and struggles over land and labor have affected racial and class inequality in incarceration. I have also written on the causes and effects of environmental inequality and inequality in death from infectious disease.  Research interests: Inequality, Incarceration, Historical Sociology, Social Theory

Cybelle Fox

Prof. Fox’s main research interests include race and ethnic relations, the American welfare state, immigration, historical sociology, and political sociology. Her most recent book, Three Worlds of Relief (Princeton University Press, 2012), compares the incorporation of blacks, Mexicans, and European immigrants in the American welfare system from the Progressive Era to the New Deal.

Loic Wacquant

My interests include race as a denegated form of ethnicity; embodiment; the penal state; urban marginality; social theory and the politics of reason. One project is a comparative historical sociology of the four “peculiar institutions” that have fabricated race in the United States over four centuries: slavery, the Jim Crow system of racial terrorism, the urban ghetto, and the hyperghetto-cum-prison.

Sandra Smith

My research interests focus on urban poverty, joblessness, and social networks and social capital. I am currently completing a book manuscript, tentatively titled Lone Pursuit: Cultures of Distrust and Individualism among Black Poor Jobseekers, in which I examine the role of joblessness discourses in inhibiting or facilitating cooperation between black poor jobseekers and their jobholding ties.

Martin Sanchez-Jankowski

My work involves the study of inter-ethnic violence in Los Angeles and Oakland Schools, and research on the dynamics of social change and persistence in long-term poverty neighborhoods in Los Angeles and New York City.

John Lie

I am currently working on two books. One is a work of general social theory that focuses on modes of explanation, tentatively entitled The Consolation of Social Theory. Another is probably the final installment of my research on the Korean diaspora, tentatively entitled Diasporic Nationalism.

Irene Bloemraad

Irene Bloemraad focuses on nexus between immigration and politics, with a special focus on the dynamics that facilitate (or hinder) immigrants’ incorporation into the political systems of the United States and Canada. Current projects examine immigrant/ethnic community organizations, the role of NGOs in fostering immigrant women’s political leadership, the degree of “public voice” accorded to immigrants in the mainstream media, the political socialization of Mexican-American children in mixed-status families and research on naturalization and dual citizenship. Some of these themes appear in Bloemraad’s forthcoming book, Becoming a Citizen, to be published in 2006 by University of California Press.

Natalia Brizuela

Natalia Brizuela is Associate Professor of Film & Media and Spanish & Portuguese where she is also affiliated with the Department of Gender & Women’s Studies, the DE in Critical Theory and the CRG. Her work focuses on photography, film and contemporary art, critical theory and aesthetics. She is the author of two photography books, Fotografia e Imperio. Paisagens para um Brasil Moderno (2012), and Depois da fotografia. Uma literatura fora de si (2014), and the co-author of two books that accompany exhibitions she curated, The Matter of Photography in the Americas (2018) and Photography at its Limits (2019). She has co-edited, among others, a special issue of the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies (2015) on Grete Stern and Horacio Coppola and a book of essays on Osvaldo Lamborghini, Y todo el resto es literatura
(2008). With Leticia Sabsay she is the co-editor of the book series “Critical South” (Polity Books) that both translates into English and commissions books of theory from the Global South.

Estelle Tarica

Prof. Tarica is the author of The Inner Life of Mestizo Nationalism (University of Minnesota Press, 2008), concerning the discourse of indigenismo and mestizaje in Mexico, Peru and Bolivia and focusing on the work of José María Arguedas, Rosario Castellanos and Jesús Lara. Her current book manuscript examines the circulation and reception of Holocaust testimony in Latin America. Her research areas include the study of racial ideologies and how these are linked to discourses of cultural decolonization, especially in Mexico, the Andes and the French Caribbean.

Daylet Domínguez

Daylet Domínguez is an Assistant Professor of Latin America and Caribbean literatures and cultures. Her work focuses on modern travel cultures and costumbrismo; visuality and writing; empire, nation and revolution; and slavery.

Philip Kan Gotanda

Over the last three decades, playwright Philip Kan Gotanda has been a major influence in the broadening of our definition of theater in America. Through his plays and advocacy, he has been instrumental in bringing stories of Asians in the United States to mainstream American theater as well as to Europe and Asia. Mr. Gotanda holds a law degree from Hastings College of Law and studied pottery in Japan with the late Hiroshi Seto. Mr. Gotanda is a respected independent filmmaker; his film, Life Tastes Good, was presented at the Sundance Film Festival. Mr. Gotanda, alongside Michael Sasaki, had a chinglish version of My Boyfriend’s Back with Joan Chen singing lead on the Hong Kong pop charts before it was banned. Mr. Gotanda is the recipient of a Guggenheim as well as other honors and awards. He resides at Gotanda Art Plant in the Berkeley Hills with his writer-producer wife, Diane Takei, and their famously ill-behaved dog, Toulouse.

Shannon Steen

Professor Steen writes and teaches about race and performance, primarily in the intersection of the African American and Asian American worlds.  She is the author most recently of Racial Geometries: The Black Atlantic, Asian Pacific, and American Theatre (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010; part of the Studies in International Performance Series), and is co-editor of AfroAsian Encounters: Culture, History, Politics (New York University Press, 2006).  She has published articles in Theater Journal as well as Essays in Theater/Études Théâtrales.  She is currently at work on her new project ReOrientations: California and the Performance of Cultural Location.  Before joining the faculty at Berkeley, she taught for the M.F.A. acting program at A.C.T. in San Francisco, and in the English Department at Northwestern University.

Abigail De Kosnik

Berkeley Center for New Media and the Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies; Member of Gender & Women’s Studies; Popular media, particularly digital media, film and television, and fan studies

SanSan Kwan

Research interests include critical dance studies; transnational Asian American studies; theories of space and kinesthesia, and interculturalism.

Brandi Wilkins Catanese

African American Theater and popular culture; performance theory; performance and politics; performance and diaspora; Black Theater Workshop. Joint appointment in African American Studies, Affiliated faculty in Gender and Women’s Studies. Articles in Theatre Journal, Performance Research, Journal of American Drama and Theatre, and Contemporary African American Women Playwrights: A Casebook; forthcoming articles on black women’s diaspora performance; whiteface performance; the politics of representation in black theater; and black political culture. Catanese is currently completing Racial Transgressions, a book-length study of the impact of multiculturalism and colorblindness on black performance practices.

Angela Marino

Professor Marino focuses on the intersection of politics and performance in the Americas. Her research includes popular cultures, fiesta and carnival, U.S. Latina/o and Latin American plays, history and performance.