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.

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

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.

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

Stefania Pandolfo

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

Charles Hirschkind

Daniel Fisher

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

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.

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.

Judith Butler

critical theory, gender and sexuality studies, comparative literature, 19th and 20th century continental philosophy, social and political thought, philosophy and literature

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.

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).

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.

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.

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 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

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.

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

Bertrall Ross

Bertrall Ross’s research interests are driven by a normative concern about democratic responsiveness and a methodological approach that integrates political theory and empirical social science into discussions of legal doctrine, the institutional role of courts, and democratic design. In the area of legislation, his current research seeks to address how courts should reconcile legislative supremacy with the vexing problem of interpreting statutes in contexts not foreseen by the enacting legislature. In election law, he is examining the constitutional dimensions and the structural sources of the marginalization of the poor in the American political process.

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.

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.

Steve Crum

Ethnohistory of North America, Native American higher education, Western Shoshone (Read more about Professor Crum in the Fall 2004 issue of Faultlines.)

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.

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.