Faculty

Guillermo Algaze, Ph.D.,Professor
Algaze is an expert on Near Eastern, Anatolian, and Mesopotamian archaeology, early civilizations, and complex societies.
Geoffrey Braswell, Ph.D., Professor

Braswell is an expert on the archaeology of Mexico and Central America, particularly the ancient Maya civilization.

Geoffrey Braswell
Thomas Csordas, Ph.D., Professor
Tom Csordas is an expert on psychological and medical anthropology, anthropological theory, and comparative religion.
Hannah Garth, Ph.D, Assistant Professor
Dr. Garth is a sociocultural and medical anthropologist specializing in the anthropology of food. Her work addresses issues of inequality and structural violence, with regional interests in Latin American, the Caribbean, and the United States. She currently has active research projects in Cuba and Los Angeles. In Cuba, she has conducted research on household food acquisition practices and the changing Cuban food system. In Los Angeles, she has been researching the food justice movement and the organizations that work toward increasing healthy food access in low-income areas. Both projects address issues of race and gender based inequality.
Paul Goldstein, Ph.D., Professor & Department Chair
Goldstein is an expert on complex societies, anthropological archaeology, Latin America, Peru and Andean South America, El Nino, and ancient climate change.
John B. Haviland, Ph.D., Professor

Haviland is an anthropological linguist, with interests in the social life of language. His major research has been on Tzotzil (Mayan) in highland Chiapas.

John B. Haviland
Janis H. Jenkins, Ph.D., Professor

Jenkins is an expert on psychological and medical anthropology, mental health, and Mexican and Central American migrants.
Amy Non, Ph.D., MPH Associate Professor

Amy Non's interests are in the genetic and sociocultural contributors to racial and social inequalities in health. Currently, she is investigating how social experiences can become biologically embedded early in life to affect health throughout the life course.

Amy Non
David Pedersen, Ph.D., Associate Professor
David Pedersen is an expert on relations between El Salvador and the United States, particularly the recent decades of Salvadoran migration.
Nancy Grey Postero, Ph.D., Professor
Postero is an expert on political economy, multiculturalism, citizenship, identity, indigenous politics, development, and non-governmental organizations.
Rihan Yeh, Ph.D., Associate Professor

Straddling linguistic and sociocultural anthropology, Rihan Yeh’s research focuses on the effects of the US-Mexico border on public life in Tijuana, Baja California. Her first book, Passing: Two Publics in a Mexican Border City, uses the close analysis of texts and interactions to show how Mexican senses of self and collectivity take shape in relation to both the promise of passage across the border and the threat of prohibition it incarnates. Currently, she is at work on a second book about visual exchanges at, around, and across the border, while simultaneously exploring new interests in urban and transborder mobilities.

Rihan Yeh

Rafael Núñez, Ph.D., Professor
Rafael Núñez is an expert in how the human mind creates abstraction. His particular interest is in high-level cognitive phenomena.

Matilde Córdoba Azcárate, Ph.D., Associate Professor

Azcárate’s research specializes in critical tourism development, space production and heritage politics in contemporary southern Mexico (Yucatan) and Spain.

Matilde Córdoba Azcárate
Alex Fattal, Ph.D., Associate Professor

My research explores the representational politics surrounding Colombia’s war and the fitful efforts to forge a less violent future in that country. My work is deeply interdisciplinary, combining media studies, socio-cultural anthropology, and the documentary arts. In additional to traditional scholarship, I also make films and collaborate in photography projects with immigrant, refugee, and marginalized communities. I also seek to publish in Spanish whenever possible. I’ve listed a few of my key publications below. For a more extensive list, please see my Academia page.

Alex Fattal
Brian Goldfarb, Ph.D., Associate Professor
Goldfarb is a digital media artist, curator, and educator. His research and visual media production focuses on media studies and contemporary visual and digital culture.
Anthony J. Harb, Ph.D., Assistant Professor
Trained in Sociolinguistics, Linguistic Anthropology, and Education, Dr. Harb’s research interests revolve around the intersection of language, media, immigration, and education with a particular focus on emergent immigrant communities in the US. His current research project, based on his dissertation, is a multi-sited ethnography that traces how a primarily Mexican immigrant community in rural Minnesota uses community radio to construct and assert their collective and individual identities in the public sphere. Using interdisciplinary linguistic and media theories and methods, Harb takes a participatory approach to better understand how speakers within this community use face-to-face and mediated language to negotiate, resist, and restructure power as they build a local social justice movement. His research contends with how social inequality along the axes of race, gender, ethnicity, and citizenship status is negotiated and reconfigured through language practices and ideologies about those practices. His research has been supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Institute for Citizens and Scholars.
Daniel Hallin, Distinguished Professor
Hallin is an expert on U.S. media coverage of Latin America and comparative analysis of media and politics.
Elana Zilberg, Ph.D., Associate Professor
Zilberg's research interests include global flows of people, money, and commodities. She is currently working on the policing and deportation of Salvadoran immigrant gang youth and their reception in El Salvador.

Marc-Andreas Muendler, Ph.D., Professor

Muendler is an expert on international trade and international finance with a focus on trade and investment policies and their effects on domestic industries and labor markets.

Marc-Andreas Muendler
Natalia Ramondo, Ph.D., Associate Professor

Research Interest: International trade with a particular emphasis on the behavior of multinational firms. She explores the determinants of multinational activities as well as their effects on the receiving countries. Recently, she has focused on the dynamic behavior of multinational firms. Her research blends theory, data, and quantitative methods.

Natalia Ramondo
James Rauch, Ph.D., Professor
Rauch is an expert on International Trade, Economic Growth and Development.

María José Aragón, Ph.D., Assistant Professor

Dr. María José Aragón is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Education Studies. Her interdisciplinary research examines language and literacy practices in K-12 settings with a focus on how emergent bilinguals and students from minoritized backgrounds employ their linguistic and cultural resources to learn and engage with others. She received a Ph.D. in Education with emphasis in Applied Linguistics and Language, Interaction, and Social Organization from the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). María was previously the Director of Instruction for the SKILLS (School Kids Investigating Language in Life and Society) Program, a social justice-oriented university-community partnership at UCSB. As a teacher educator, she has taught courses on bilingual education and dual language learners at California State Polytechnic University, San Luis Obispo, and California State University, Channel Islands.
Luz Chung, M.A. and Ed.D., Lecturer/Supervisor Secondary World Languages

Luz Chung received her her B.A. in Applied Mathematics, and her M.A. and Ed.D. in Teaching and Learning from the University of California, San Diego. She holds Single Subject credentials in Math and Spanish, a Multiple Subjects credential, a preliminary Administrative Services credential, and a Bilingual, Crosscultural, Language and Academic Development Certificate (BCLAD). Prior to joining EDS, Dr. Chung was a middle school bilingual teacher in Logan Heights, and served as a middle school vice-principal in City Heights (San Diego Unified School District). Dr. Chung also directed teacher professional development programs for UCSD Extension. Dr. Chung’s areas of interest are critical pedagogy, multicultural and multilingual education, and service-learning. Dr. Chung teaches undergraduate foundation courses as part of the EDS minor, as well as M.Ed. courses.
Shana Cohen, Ph.D., Associate Professor

Dr. Cohen's research examines Mexican heritage families’ beliefs and experiences with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). She is particularly interested in how parents’ beliefs about ASD causes, symptoms, and treatments shape parents’ educational decisions, childrearing goals, and parenting practices. She utilizes a sociocultural framework informed by the literature on cultural models of education and child socialization from typically developing Mexican immigrant families to inform her work.

Shana Cohen
Frances Contreras, Ph.D., Adjunct Professor
Dr.Contreras’ most recent books include: Achieving Equity for Latino Students, Expanding the Pathway to Higher Education through Public Policy and The Latino Education Crisis with P. Gandara. Her current book, Cultivating Latino Students in STEM examines the promising approaches of campus programs as well as individual agency among Latinx high achievers in college to succeed in STEM pathways.
Makeba Jones, Ph.D., Associate Teaching Professor
Jones' specific interests reside in school reform, educational equity, and urban education. Jones has expertise in areas such as the social and cultural organization of schools, student engagement, tracking/ability grouping, secondary school reform, educational policy, teacher professional development, school-university partnerships, high school to college transitions, and youth leadership/development.
Alison Wishard Guerra, Ph.D., Associate Professor

Dr. Wishard Guerra’s research focuses on culture and development in early childhood, with particular focus on social and language development among Latino children from low-income families. Her research looks specifically at how social relationships and interactions may serve as protective factors for later cognitive development among at-risk children. She studies within group variations related to immigration and acculturation experiences and their associations to children's developmental outcomes.

Alison Wishard Guerra

Kirstie Dorr, Ph.D, Assistant Professor
Dorr is an expert on critical race, gender and transnational cultural studies.
Jose I. Fuste, Ph.D., Assistant Professor

His early research examined the intersections between racism, colonialism, and residential segregation in Puerto Rico’s public housing projects. Fusté is currently drafting a book manuscript titled Entangled Crossings: Afro-Latino Migrations Between Race and Empire in which he explores the role that US imperialism played in producing solidarities but also in cementing political wedges between afro-descended Latinxs from the Hispanophone Caribbean and Black Americans between the early 1900s and the 1960s. Fusté is also writing a series of research articles—the first of which recently appeared in the Radical History Review—about the under-acknowledged legal, geostrategic, political, and economic interrelationships between Puerto Rico and other spaces of “concentrated US colonialism”.

Jose I. Fuste
Ross Frank, Ph.D., Associate Professor

Frank is an expert on northern Mexico during the colonial and early national period, and on Native American history and culture.

Ross Frank
Andrew Jolivétte, Ph.D., Professor & Chair
Native American and Indigenous Studies (Senior Specialist); Critical Mixed Race Studies; Two-Spirit, Gender and Sexuality Studies; Medical Sociology, Public Health and HIV; Research Justice, CBPR and Indigenous Methodologies; Decolonial Education; Queer Indigenous Citizenship and Knowledges; Creole, Black, Latinx and Comparative Critical Ethnic Studies.
Curtis Marez, Ph.D., Professor & Director

I’m a product of California public education, first in the schools of the Central Valley and ultimately in the University of California. I’ve previously taught at the University of Chicago, the University of California at Santa Cruz, and the University of Southern California. I’m the former editor of American Quarterly, the official journal of the American Studies Association (ASA); past-President of the ASA; and Chair of the Ethnic Studies Department (2012-2016).

Curtis Marez
Roy Pérez, Ph.D., Assistant Professor

His published work and his teaching focus on gender, sexuality, and race in Latinx literary and visual culture, with special attention to cross-cultural collaborations in Latinx writing, performance, and activism.

Roy Pérez
Katherine Steelman, Ph.D., Lecturer
Dr. Katherine Steelman is a lecturer in Ethnic Studies and Critical Gender Studies at UCSD. She earned a B.A in English at University of California, Riverside, an M.A. English at Cal State Long Beach, and a PhD in Ethnic Studies at UCSD. Broadly, her work examines how sexually non-normative spaces are socially and materially constructed in Tijuana, BC, MX. She takes up US cultural production, as well as the Tijuanense response to the US's narrative of the city and its cuir communities. This work juxtaposes critical analyses of cultural texts with ethnographic interviews. Currently, she is working on a project that engages cultural representations of Haiti in the US and Mexico, as well as collaborative ethnographic work with Haitian migrants in Tijuana.
Daphne Taylor-García, Ph.D., Associate Professor & Director

Daphne V. Taylor-García’s research interests are colonialisms in the Americas; the coloniality of gender, sexuality and being; the visual economies of the casta system and plantation slavery; and contemporary decolonial analysis and politics.
Wayne Yang, Ph.D., Professor & Provost Muir College
Dr. Yang writes about decolonization and everyday epic organizing, particularly from underneath ghetto colonialism, often with his frequent collaborator, Eve Tuck. Currently, they are convening The Land Relationships Super Collective, editing the book series, Indigenous and Decolonizing Studies in Education, and editing the journal, Critical Ethnic Studies. He is interested in the complex role of cities in global affairs: cities as sites of settler colonialism, as stages for empire, as places of resettlement and gentrification, and as always-already on Indigenous lands.

Luis Alvarez, Ph.D., Associate Professor
Dr. Alvarez's research and teaching interests include relational race and ethnicity, popular culture, and social movements in the history of Chicanas/os, Latinas/os, African Americans, and the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands. His current projects include, From Civil Rights to Global Justice: Popular Culture and the Politics of the Possible, an investigation of race, pop culture, and social movements in the Americas since World War II, and Latino Soldiering: Ethnic Politics and Military Service in World War II, which explores the multiracial, gender, and transnational politics of Mexican American and Afro Latino soldiers from boot camp to combat to post war life.
Rosie Bermudez, Ph.D., Assistant Professor

Rosie C. Bermudez is a Chicana social historian of the twentieth-century United States and an interdisciplinary scholar of Chicana and Chicano Studies and Feminist and Women’s Studies. She received her PhD in Chicana and Chicano Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2019. Her dissertation research was supported by the Ford Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, and the University of California Institute for Mexico and the United States. Her journey through the academy began at East Los Angeles College and prior to joining the faculty at UC San Diego she was a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow at UCLA in the department of History (2019-2021).

Her research and teaching interests include twentieth-century Chicana and Latina history, women of color feminisms, twentieth-century social movements, race and ethnicity, grassroots activism, history of Los Angeles, women’s history, and oral history.
Ben Cowan, Ph.D., Associate Professor
His interest in right-wing radicalism, morality, sexuality, and 20th-century imperialism has led him to research focused on Cold War Brazil, with a specialization in the cultural and gender history of the post-1964 era. Dr. Cowan’s book Securing Sex: Morality and Repression in the Making of Cold War Brazil was published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2016. The monograph has won book awards from the Latin American Studies Association and the Southeastern Conference on Latin American Studies.
Jessica Graham, Ph.D., Associate Professor
Graham spent two months in Brazil, where her experiences with Afro-Brazilian academics and activists led to an interest in Brazilian history. Her current book manuscript, Shifting the Meaning of Democracy: Racial Inclusion as a Strategy of the U.S. and Brazilian States, 1930-45, assesses Brazil and the United States during the Great Depression and World War II.
Bright Gyamfi, Ph.D., Assistant Professor
My interest in history was sparked by an American Ghana-based elementary school teacher and fueled by watching Liberty’s Kids as a child living in North Carolina. After taking an undergraduate African history course, what had started as a mere spark developed into a strong passion, hence my decision to become a historian. Today, I am a scholar of West African and African Diaspora intellectual history, nationalism, Pan-Africanism, Black internationalism, and economic development. I write on African intellectuals who worked to transform and radicalize the study of Africa in academic and intellectual centers around the Atlantic. I have received research fellowships and grants from several organizations and institutions, including the Social Science Research Council and the Fulbright-IIE. My work has appeared in the Journal of African American History, African Studies Review, Africa is a Country, and The Conversation. I hold a BA in History (Honors) and Political Science from the University of Notre Dame, an MSc in African Studies from the University of Oxford, and a PhD in History from Northwestern University. Before joining UC San Diego, I was a Presidential Fellow at Northwestern University.
Christine Hunefeldt, Ph.D., Professor
Hunefeldt's research interests include economic and social history of the Andean region, slavery and abolition, and women and family history.
Sara Kozameh, Ph.D., Assistant Professor
Sara Kozameh received her Ph.D. in Latin American and Caribbean History from New York University in 2020. Her research specializes on the Cuban Revolution, social movements and popular uprisings, agrarian history, and Black radicalism. Professor Kozameh is completing her first book, which is a history of the agrarian reform project that transformed Cuba during the first decade of its 1959 revolution. Tentatively titled Harvest of Revolution: Agrarian Reform and the Making of Revolutionary Cuba, the book centers the actions of ordinary people immersed in the upheaval of revolution to rethink the origins and process of the revolutionary project. Before joining UCSD, she was the postdoctoral research fellow at Princeton University’s prestigious Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies from 2020-2022 and an ACLS Emerging Voices postdoctoral fellow at Vanderbilt University from 2022-23.
Verónica Martínez-Matsuda, Ph.D., Associate Professor

Professor Martínez-Matsuda's teaching fields of interest and expertise include: U.S. Modern Social and Cultural History, Labor and Working-Class History, the Great Depression and the New Deal, the War on Poverty, Immigration/Migration History, Latinx Studies, U.S.-Mexico Borderlands Studies, and Comparative Race and Ethnic Studies.

Before joining the faculty at UC San Diego, Martínez-Matsuda taught for over ten years at Cornell University’s school of Industrial Labor Relations in the department of Labor Relations, Law, and History. At Cornell, she was also a member of the Graduate Faculty in the fields of American Studies, Latin American Studies, Latinx Studies, and Asian American Studies. She has received numerous teaching awards, including the 2021 SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching.
Dana Velasco Murillo, Ph.D, Associate Professor
Velasco Murillo's research interests center on the intersections of colonialism with ethnicity, gender, identity formation, and urbanism in early Latin America.
Pamela Radcliff, Ph.D., Professor & Chair
Radcliff's research interests include Spanish politics, culture, and Labor Reform in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries.
Daniel Widener, Ph.D., Associate Professor
Widener is an expert on African-American and California history.
Matthew Vitz, Ph.D., Associate Professor
Professor Vitz’s research spans the urban and environmental history of Mexico and Latin America, energy history, the ecological and social impacts of beachfront tourism in twentieth-century Mexico, and food history. He is particularly drawn to questions of environmental justice, the way power is anchored in the material environment, urban metabolisms, and the dialectical relationships between cities and their national and transnational hinterlands

Peter Cowhey, Ph.D., Dean Emeritus and Qualcomm Chair Emeritus
Richard Feinberg, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus

Research Fields: Cuba, Latin America, U.S. foreign policy, multilateral institutions, trade and investment, globalization, democratization, non-governmental organizations.

Richard Feinberg
Rafael Fernández de Castro, Ph.D., Professor
Rafael Fernández de Castro is a professor at the School and director of its Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies (USMEX). A former foreign policy adviser to President Felipe Calderón, he is an expert on bilateral relations between Mexico and the U.S.
Stephan Haggard, Ph.D., Professor

Professor Haggard's research interests center on the international relations and comparative political economy of East Asia and Latin America.

Stephan Haggard Twitter
Agustina Paglayan, Ph.D., Assistant Professor

Research Fields: political economy, comparative politics, education systems, labor market institutions, state capacity, applied econometrics, historical research methods, politics of policymaking in Latin America and the U.S.

Agustina Paglayan Twitter
Sandra L. Pedregal, M.A., Lecturer

Ms. Pedregal teaches content-oriented, Spanish language courses at advanced levels. Past course themes have included technology and science; international politics and economics; business and maquiladoras; and, environmental policy.
Mateo Vásquez-Cortés, Ph.D., Assistant Professor
Mateo Vásquez-Cortés is an assistant professor of political science at the School of Global Policy and Strategy. His research is in applied political economy, focusing on conflict processes, identity and migration in the context of Latin America. A native of Medellín, Colombia, Vásquez-Cortés earned his B.A. and M.A. in philosophy from Universidad Nacional de Colombia and a B.A. in economics from Universidad Externado de Colombia. He received a Ph.D. in political science from New York University. Before joining GPS, he was an assistant professor of political science at Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México.

Eric Bakovic, Ph.D., Professor & Chair

Bakovic is an expert on the sound patterns of the Spanish spoken in Latin American and the Iberian Peninsula.

Eric Bakovic
Gabriela Caballero, Ph.D. Associate Professor

Caballero is interested in Languages of the Americas (particularly Uto-Aztecan languages), phonology, morphology, language description and documentation, comparative/historical linguistics, typology.

Gabriela Caballero
Grant Goodall, Ph.D., Professor & Director

Goodall is an expert on syntactic theory, structure of Spanish, second language acquisition and methodology of language teaching.

Grant Goodall
John C. Moore, Ph.D., Professor & Dean

Moore's research interests include Spanish syntax, causative and restructuring constructions, and lexical semantics.

John C. Moore

Carol Arcos Herrera, Ph.D., Assistant Professor
Professor Arcos specializes in feminisms, gender, and sexuality studies from a psychoanalytical perspective in the Southern Cone. She is currently working on a book-length project tentatively titled Maternities, a Feminist Essay. This work studies the issue of maternity from a feminist, psychoanalytical perspective, bringing together activism and the history of women thru an interpretation of Chilean and Latin American literature and culture.
Ryan M. Bessett, Ph.D. Associate Professor
Ryan Bessett received a PhD in Hispanic Linguistics from the University of Arizona. His research interests center around language variation and change, Spanish in contact, bilingualism, Spanish as a heritage language, language acquisition, and Spanish phonology. He is especially interested in the Spanish spoken around the US-Mexican border and through variationist methodology differentiating contact-induced change from language-internal variation by comparing the Spanish of monolingual speakers in Sonora, Mexico to the Southern Arizona bilingual Spanish of speakers who come from families from Sonora.
John Blanco, Ph.D., Associate Professor & Director

Blanco is an expert on Filipino Literature, 19th century Latin American and Caribbean Literature, and Anti-Colonial Thought.
José Ignacio Carvajal Regidor, Ph.D. Assistant Professor
Ignacio Carvajal obtained a PhD in Latin American Literatures and Cultures from the University of Texas at Austin. Their research interests include Indigenous responses to colonialism and evangelization during the early colonial period; pedagogical approaches to Indigenous language teaching & learning (especially K’iche’); Central American literatures and cultures; Poetry; Translation, and Digital Humanities. He also writes and translates poetry.
Amy Sara Carroll, Ph.D., Associate Professor
Teaching interests include creative writing (poetry, creative non-fiction, performance, visual and e-literatures, cross-genre writing); twentieth and twenty-first century Latin/x American art, literature, and cinema; transnational American and border studies; critical theory; cultural studies; ethnic studies; and gender and sexuality studies.
Gloria Chacon, Ph.D., Associate Professor

Chacon's interests lay in Indigenous literatures of the Americas; Chican/Latin literary and cultural movements; Central American poetics and politics; US Central Americans; Latin American literary and cultural theories.
Dennis Childs, Ph.D. Associate Professor
Areas of teaching and research: Prison Studies; Slavery Studies; African American Literature; Legal Studies; Blues; American Literature; Racial Gothic Literature
Stephanie Jed, Ph.D., Professor
Jed interests include Italian early modern literature; medieval Italian literature; Italian humanism; comparative early modern constructions of knowledge (Italian, French, English, Spanish); paleography, the history of libraries, the history of writing; gender studies; interdisciplinary theory; language acquisition; language and movement; neuroscience and literature.
Sara Johnson, Ph.D., Associate Professor
Johnsons research and teaching areas include literature and theory of the Hispanophone, Francophone and Anglophone Caribbean and its diasporas; inter-American literature; the Age of Revolution in the extended Americas; African-American literature; music and dance of the African Diaspora; hemispheric american cultural studies.
Luis Martín-Cabrera, Ph.D., Associate Professor
Martin-Cabrera is an expert on Marxism and Psychoanalysis as a theoretical matrix to address a series of problems such as the politics of memory in Spain and Latin America, the convoluted relationship between market, culture and State, the privatization of the public university, the critique of Neo-liberalism in Latin America and the development of intersectional analysis (the asymmetrical relationship between race, gender, class, and sexuality) as a tool to rethink labor history, neo-colonialism, migration and the global and national struggles against the expansion of capitalism.
Jacobo Myerston Santana, Ph.D. Assistant Professor
Myerston is interested in questions related to literary globalization in the ancient world, and his research addresses the relationship between literatures and hermeneutics of Ancient Greece and Mesopotamia. He is also interested in the reception of Ancient Mediterranean literature by Latin American writers and the digital humanities.
Andrea Mendoza, Ph.D., Assistant Professor
Her research and teaching areas combine the studies of 20th and 21st century East Asian and Latin American literatures and visual cultures; transpacific studies; feminist and gender studies; critical race studies; and intellectual history. Her current projects focus on developing an intersectional and transpacific approach to comparing philosophical, literary, and cinematic discourses on race and racism in Mexico and Japan and their role in constituting ideas about national identity in the twentieth century.
Ariana Ruiz Ph.D., Assistant Professor
Her research and teaching areas include: Chicanx/Latinx literary and cultural studies; cultural citizenship; feminist and gender studies; critical race theory; and cultural geography. She is particularly interested in how travel and mobility are explored in Latina/x cultural expression.
Jorge Sánchez Cruz, Ph.D., Assistant Professor

Jorge Sánchez Cruz is a scholar of 19th to 21st century Latin American literature, culture, and thought, with an emphasis on Mexico. Their research shows how aesthetic creations by Indigenous, queer, trans*, and undocumented subjects reflect and are grounded in the racial and gendered paradigms shaped by the afterlives of slavery and colonization. Gender and sexuality studies, continental philosophy, Indigenous studies, queer theory, and decolonial thought contour their pedagogy and research inquiries.

Their current manuscript, Aesthetics of Repair: AIDS, Race, and Sexual Politics in the Americas, explores literature and visual culture in 1980s and 1990s Mexico and Chile. This book is embedded in the reparative turn. It probes that if often the AIDS pandemic has been seen through loss, death, and disappearance, it too can be reimagined through affirmative worldly inhabitations— like joy, intimacy, and community praxes—enacted by racialized sexual dissidents as enduring strategies in sight of catastrophe.

Their work has appeared and is forthcoming in Social Text, TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, La Ventana: Revista de Estudios de Género, Harvard’s Review of Latin America, Mester, ASAP/Journal, among other venues. They are the co-editor of the forthcoming book Teoría Queer/Cuir en México (Editorial Signos) and translator of Nestor Perlongher’s The Specter of AIDS (forthcoming with Punctum Books).

Sánchez Cruz is also working a second project that investigates the re-actualization of colonialism and coloniality in the Mexican South, with attention to the Coastal Region of Oaxaca. Developments of this project have appeared in Harvard’s Review of Latin America and forthcoming as “Apuntes para un giro queer decolonial” in Teoría Queer/Cuir en México.

Their research and teaching have been funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), UPenn’s Center for Research in Feminist, Queer, and Transgender Studies, The David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, and two times by Harvard University’s Provostial Fund for the Arts and the Humanities.

Before UCSD, Sánchez Cruz held academic appointments at Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and Northwestern University.
Brandon Som, Ph.D., Associate Professor
Brandon Som received his Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Southern California, and an M.F.A. in Poetry at the University of Pittsburgh. His teaching and writing interests include 20^th- and 21^st century poetry, transpacific literature, Asian-American and Chicanx poetry, citational poetics, and sound studies.
Shelley S. Streeby, Ph.D., Professor

Streeby works in the interdisciplinary fields of American Studies and Ethnic Studies, with a specialization in U.S. literary, cultural, and historical studies through the early 20th century. Her teaching and research interests include 19th and 20th century U.S. Literature and Culture; Chicana/o and Latina/o Studies; The Cultures of Sentiment and Sensation; Comparative Colonialisms, War, and Cultural Memory; Gender Studies and Queer Theory; Film, Media, and Visual Culture; Transnational Literatures and Movements; and Fantasy, SF, and Speculative Fiction. In 2006, she received the Chancellor’s Associates Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching. She is Associate Editor of American Quarterly: The Journal of American Studies Association and serves on the editorial board of Literature Compass.

Shelley S. Streeby
Nadia Villafuerte, Ph.D., Assistant Professor
Nadia Villafuerte (Chiapas, 1978) studied music, literature, and journalism in Mexico. She has received grants from the National Foundation for Culture and Arts, the Foundation for Mexican Literature, the Fellowship for Academic Excellence and Studies Abroad CONACYT-FONCA, and a Mexican national grant for an artistic residency in New York City in 2013. She has published three fiction books: Barcos en Houston (Mexico, 2005, translated into English and published as Ships in Houston in the U.S. in 2023), ¿Te gusta el látex, cielo? (Mexico, 2008), and Por el lado salvaje (Mexico, 2011). She is part of the literary anthologies México20: New Voices, Old Traditions (U.K., 2015, as part of the British Council/HAY Festival), and Palabras mayores, nueva narrativa mexicana (Spain, 2015), among others. Villafuerte received an MFA in the Creative Writing Program in Spanish at NYU and a PhD from the same university. As a scholar and professor, she has received the Global Research Initiative (GRI), the Migration Network Award, the Outstanding Teaching Award, and the Penfield Fellowship (all at NYU).

Olivia A. Graeve, Ph.D., Professor
Prof. Olivia A. Graeve joined the University of California San Diego in 2012 and is currently the Elias Masry Endowed Chair in Engineering, Professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Director of the CaliBaja Center for Resilient Materials and Systems (http://resilientmaterials.ucsd.edu/), Director of the Program of Materials Science and Engineering, and 24-25 Chair of the UC San Diego Academic Senate. She holds a Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering (2001) from the University of California, Davis, and a Bachelor of Science degree in Structural Engineering (1995) from the University of California San Diego. Her area of research focuses on the design and processing of new materials for extreme environments, including extremes of temperature, pressure, and radiation. Prof. Graeve has been involved in many activities related to the recruitment and retention of women and underrepresented minority students in science and engineering and has received several prestigious awards including the Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics and Engineering Mentoring in 2020. She has been inducted into the Tijuana Walk of Fame (2014), the Mexican Academy of Engineering (2016), the Mexican Academy of Sciences (2019), the Latin American Academy of Sciences (2022), and has been named Fellow of the American Ceramic Society (2017) and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2021).

Kimberly Brouwer, Ph.D., Associate Adjunct Professor - Department of Medicine, Division of Global Health

Brouwer's research interests includes infectious disease epidemiology, geographic information systems, and migrant health.

Kimberly Brouwer
Richard Garfein, PhD, M.P.H., Professor - Department of Family Medicine

Garfein is an expert on behavioral transmission of blood borne viral infections, including HIV, HBV.

Richard Garfein
Steffanie A. Strathdee, Ph.D., Professor - Global Public Health

Strathdee is an expert in epidemiology, infectious diseases and border health.

Steffanie A. Strathdee
Jose Ricardo Suarez Ph.D, Assistant Professor - Family Medicine and Public Health

His primary interest is in understanding the role of environmental pollutants and oxidative stress on human development and chronic disease.

He is the principal investigator of the Secondary Pesticide Exposure on Infants, Children and Adolescents study (ESPINA – Estudio de la Exposicion Secundaria a Plaguicidas en Infantes, Niños y Adolescentes). The ESPINA study had the objective of understanding the associations between chronic, sub-clinical exposures to pesticides and physiological and neurobehavioral development alterations among children living in agricultural (floricultural) communities in Pedro Moncayo County, Ecuador.

His recent work has focused on examining the associations between persistent organic pollutants and alterations in glucose metabolism, obesity and subclinical heart disease in middle age adults.

Jose Ricardo Suarez
Kiyomi Tsuyuki PhD, M.P.H., Assistant Adjunct Professor - Department of Medecine
Dr. Kiyomi Tsuyuki, PhD, MPH is a health behavior scientist who investigates the social and structural determinants of the syndemic overlap of substance use, mental health, violence, and HIV/STI prevention and care. Dr. Tsuyuki’s applies a social justice framework and bio-behavioral approach to understand how chronic stress from socio-structural inequity are linked to health disparities and syndemic outcomes.

Dr. Tsuyuki is the recipient of a US National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism Career Development Award, which funds SALUD: Syndemic Alcohol Use Disorders, Violence and HIV/STI among Young Latino Men study. SALUD frames social stress and health disparities among Latino men across their life course within the context of discrimination, masculine ideologies, Latino heterogeneity, and sexual minority stigma. Dr. Tsuyuki’s research has also been supported by the National Institute of Minority Health and Health Disparities, the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, the World Bank/Sexual Violence Research Initiative (SVRI), and the HIV Prevention Trials Network.
Maria Luisa Zúñiga, Ph.D., Associate Adjunct Professor - Department of Family & Preventive Medicine

Zuniga is an expert on behavioral, epidemiology, community based research and HIV/AIDS health care service.

Clinton Tolley, Ph.D. Professor

History of modern European philosophy, with focuses on Kant and German Idealism, early analytic philosophy, phenomenology, philosophical psychology, critical theory and the philosophy of culture (incl aesthetics); the reception-history of European philosophy in the Americas (esp the US and Mexico); Mexican philosophy.

Clinton Tolley
Manuel Vargas, Ph.D., Professor

Professor Vargas specializes in moral psychology, free will, and Latin American philosophy.

Manuel Vargas

Marisa Abrajano, Ph.D., Professor

Abrajano is an expert on campaigns and elections, political behavior, Latino politics, and race and politics in the United States.

Marisa Abrajano
Scott Desposato, Ph.D., Professor

Scott Deposato is an expert on area comparative politics, especially political parties, legislatures, and elections.

Scott Desposato
David R. Mares, Ph.D., Distinguished Professor

Mares' research interests include international security, international political economy and Latin American civil-military relations.
Simeon Nichter, Ph.D., Associate Professor

His research explores the political voice of poor and marginalized populations in emerging democracies, with central reference to Latin America. He examines how politicians offer material benefits to the poor in exchange for political support, and investigates how individuals' vote choices affect subsequent access to services. Nichter has published articles in the American Political Science Review, Comparative Political Studies, Review of Economics and Statistics, and World Development.

Simeon Nichter
Sebastian M. Saiegh, Ph.D., Professor

Saiegh's research focuses on comparative politics, political economy and institutions.

Sebastian M. Saiegh
Tom K. Wong, Ph.D., Associate Professor

His research focuses on the politics of immigration, citizenship, and migrant "illegality." As these issues have far-reaching implications, his work also explores the links between immigration, race and ethnicity, and the politics of identity.

Tom K. Wong

US Immigration Policy Center

Marta Serra-Garcia, Ph.D., Assistant Professor

Marta Serra-Garcia conducts research in behavioral and experimental economics. Her research focuses on the importance of morals and social norms in economic decision-making. She studies (1) how individuals preserve their identity as moral and generous when there is an incentive to behave unethically or selfishly, (2) how the desire to conform to others affects risk taking, and (3) the impact of incentives to defect on the formation of long-term trust relationships. She also studies the determinants of mistakes in economic decision-making, focusing on the role of complexity and financial education. Serra-Garcia has been published in numerous journals including the Journal of the European Economic Association, Management Science and Games and Economic Behavior.

Marta Serra-Garcia

Camila Alvarez, Ph.D., Assistant Professor
I am an assistant professor of sociology at the University of California, San Diego. My areas of expertise are environmental sociology, environmental justice, and critical quantitative methodology. My research addresses the question: How are social inequalities reinforced through environmental problems? My background training in mathematics and passion for numbers draws me to use statistical methods in my research. I contextualize my work using theoretical frameworks from political economy and sociology of race and ethnicity. I have published in Social Problems, Social Science & Medicine, Environmental Justice, and Sociological Perspectives. In 2022, I was the recipient of the Career Enhancement Fellowship funded by the Mellon Foundation.
Michel Estefan, Ph.D., Assistant Teaching Professor

Michel Estefan received a BA in international relations and a MA in human rights from Universidad Iberoamericana (Mexico City). He received a MA in Latin American studies and a MA and PhD in sociology from the University of California, Berkeley. He is a political sociologist that studies the rule of law from a comparative and historical perspective and a committed teacher with a practice and research focus on inclusive and equitable pedagogy. His first book, Feeling Like Equals: A Gramscian Reading of the Historical Origins and Development of Human Rights was published in Spanish by Universidad Iberoamericana Press (2015). His current work in political sociology uses the empirical cases of twentieth century Spain and Mexico to unearth the authoritarian foundations of the rule of law.
David Fitzgerald, Ph.D., Professor

Professor, Gildred Chair in U.S.-Mexican Relations and Co-Director, Center for Comparative Immigration Studies. PhD UCLA 2005. Law and society, international migration, political sociology, nationalism and ethnicity, comparative-historical and ethnographic methodology.

David Fitzgerald
Danielle Raudenbush, Ph.D., Assistant Professor
In her research she asks questions that are fundamental for understanding the health and well-being of low-income people living in the United States In addition to health in urban contexts, she is interested more broadly in questions related to social cohesion among the urban poor and the role that people’s social relationships play as they cope with material deprivation.
Vanesa Ribas, Ph.D., Associate Professor
Ribas' research interests include international migration, race relations, and work.
Juan Pablo Pardo-Guerra, Ph.D., Associate Professor

Juan Pablo Pardo-Guerra is an Associate Professor in sociology at the University of California, San Diego, a founding faculty member of the Halicioğlu Data Science Institute, co-founder of the Computational Social Science program at UCSD, and Associate Director of the Latin American Studies Program at UC San Diego. His research concerns markets and their location in contemporary societies with an emphasis on finance, knowledge, and organizations.

Juan Pablo was trained in physics at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico and Science and Technology Studies at the University of Edinburgh. He has held positions at the London School of Economics and Political Science, the Museu Nacional of the Universidade Federal de Rio de Janeiro, and the University of California San Diego. Juan Pablo’s work has been published in Economy & Society, Journal of Cultural Economy, European Societies, Cultural Sociology, Theory & Society, and the British Journal of Sociology.

Juan Pablo Pardo-Guerra

Ana María Álvarez M.F. A., Associate Professor

Ana María Alvarez, a 2020 Doris Duke Artist and an inaugural Dance/USA Artist Fellow, is a prolific choreographer, skilled dancer, masterful teaching artist, and movement activist who has achieved multiple accolades for her dynamic works. Her thesis work explored the abstraction of Latine dance, specifically Salsa, as a way to express social resistance as related to the U.S. immigration battle. This work became the impetus for founding CONTRA-TIEMPO Activist Dance Theater in 2005 in Los Angeles. Her most recent work with the company, ¡azúcar! was commissioned by APAP Arts Forward and NC State Live in Raleigh, NC. She will continue to work with CONTRA-TIEMPO on further developing the work as part of Jacob's Pillow, Pillow Lab, in February 2024 and will work with local dancers as part of WinterWorks 2024. After this, ¡azúcar! will be shared as part of the 20th season of Art & Power at UCSD in Spring 2024.
Robert Castro M.F.A. Professor Acting & Directing, Director of Chicanx Latinx Studies Program

Robert Castro directs classics and new work across the U.S. and internationally. Credits include: The Public Theater/NYSF, New York Theatre Workshop, La Jolla Playhouse, Center Theatre Group/LA, Santa Fe Opera, Wiener Festwochen (Austria), Bolshoi Opera (Russia), Teatro Real (Spain). Served as Associate Artist: Mark Taper Forum/Center Theatre Group, Institute on the Arts and Civic Dialogue at ART/Harvard University, and El Teatro Campesino. Awards include: NEA/TCG Fellowship for Directors, TCG/Doris Duke New Generations Grant, Sherwood Award, Hellman Fellows Program. Member: New York Theatre Workshop and Lincoln Center Theater Directors Lab.

Robert Castro is the director of the Latinx Chicanx Studies program.
Jade Power-Sotomayor Ph. D., Professor

Dr. Jade Power-Sotomayor is a Cali-Rican educator, scholar and performer who works as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Theatre and Dance at UC San Diego. Engaging with discourses of embodiment and embodied practices of remembering and creating community, her work focuses on the fluid reconstitution of Latinx identity ultimately produced by doing and not simply being. Overall, she seeks to promote an in-depth engagement with Latinx performance-making as a framework for taking up the most salient issues of our time: colonialism, anti-Blackness, xenophobia, economic disparity, patriarchy and misogyny, queer and transphobia, ableism and mental health access, climate catastrophe and environmental justice. More than just including historically occulted voices as a form of ethnographic encounter, she looks to these instances of performance for what they reveal about the structures of power and social dynamics that have shaped the world we collectively share. Her research interests include: Latinx theatre and performance, dance studies, nightlife, eco-dramaturgies, epistemologies of the body, feminist of color critique, bilingualism, and intercultural performance in the Caribbean diaspora.

Abigail Andrews, Ph.D., Associate Professor

Andrews interest are in the areas of Globalization, Development, Gender, Migration, Political Sociology, Latinos / Latin America, Urban Studies, Social Theory, and Qualitative Methods.

Abigail Andrews

The Mexican Migration Field Research Program
John C. Arroyo, Ph.D., Assistant Professor

John C. Arroyo, Ph.D., AICP is Assistant Professor of Urban Studies and Planning and Chicanx and Latinx Studies and core faculty member of the Latinx Cluster Hire Initiative (LCHI) at the University of California San Diego. Prior to his appointment at UC San Diego he was Assistant Professor in Engaging Diverse Communities (with affiliations in the departments of Indigenous, Race, and Ethnic Studies and Historic Preservation) at the University of Oregon, where he was also Founder and Director of the Pacific Northwest Just Futures Institute for Racial and Climate Justice. Previously, Dr. Arroyo was an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellow in Latino Studies at the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Arroyo received his doctorate in Urban Planning, Policy, and Design from MIT. He is a national expert on the social, political, and cultural dimensions of immigrant-centered built and natural environments, urban design practices in emerging gateways, and arts and cultural planning. His scholarly and applied research has been published in peer-reviewed journals, books, policy reports, and featured on national media outlets. A certified planner, he has over 25 years of experience working with various arts and urbanism-related nonprofits, foundations, and government agencies in research, grantmaking, and technical assistance capacities across the US, Europe, Latin America, and the Caribbean.
Amy Lerner, Ph.D., Associate Teaching Professor

Dr. Lerner received her Ph.D. in Geography in 2011 from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Subsequently she was a postdoctoral research associate at Rutgers University, NJ, in the departments of Geography and Human Ecology (2011-2013) and at the Princeton University School of Public and International Affairs (2013-2015). She has extensive teaching experience, ranging from Latin American Geography and World Geography to the Urban Ecology of New York City. Dr. Lerner was an assistant professor in the National Laboratory for Sustainability Science in the Ecology Institute of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, UNAM, Mexico City from 2015 to 2020 where she taught courses on Sustainability Science, Transdisciplinary Research Methods, and Global Environmental Change. In Mexico City she led several research projects related to city-university partnerships, the persistence of peri-urban agriculture, and capacity-building in the local city government for risk management and resilience. Dr. Lerner’s research focuses on processes of landscape change and especially on the rural-urban frontier, sustainable aspects of city planning, including resilience, green infrastructure, and urban and peri-urban agriculture, and the science-policy interface. Her coursework includes Urban World System (USP 2), Sustainable Development (USP 171), and The Design of Social Research (USP 125).
Keith Pezzoli Director of Bioregional Center for Sustainability Science, Planning and Design

Keith Pezzoli's research couples theory building, narrative development, and civic engagement with a focus on urban, rural and bioregional development. Pezzoli directs UC San Diego’s Bioregional Center for Sustainability Science, Planning and Design (Bioregional Center). The Bioregional Center builds and facilitates knowledge-action collaboratives focused on conceptualizing, designing and enabling healthy placemaking.

Keith Pezzoli
Mirle Rabinowitz-Bussell, Ph.D., Associate Professor & Director

Mirle Rabinowitz Bussell is the Academic Director of Real Estate and Development in the Urban Studies and Planning Program at UC San Diego.

Dr. Bussell's research interests included private foundations' involvement in community development, quality of life indicators and planning in disenfranchised urban neighborhoods, affordable housing, comparative international research, healthy aging and the built environment, and local community economic development.

Edwin (Teddy) Cruz, M.F.A., Professor

Cruz's work dwells at the border between San Diego, California and Tijuana, Mexico, where he has been developing a practice and pedagogy that emerge out of the particularities of this bicultural territory.
Ricardo Dominguez, M.F.A., Associate Professor

Dominguez is an expert on electronic civil disobedience, hacktivism, digital activism, information warfare.

Critical Art Ensemble
Janelle Iglesias, MFA, Assistant Professor

Janelle Iglesias is an artist working with and through objects, materials and their physical language in space. Ranging from simple displays to complex constellations, her work often explores the relationship between humans, capitalism and the natural environment. In addition to her individual practice, Janelle maintains a project-based collaboration with her sister, as Las Hermanas Iglesias which incorporates a variety of relationships and structures for collectivity. Her individual and collaborative work has been shown widely, including at the Queens Museum, Sculpture Center, Smack Mellon, Socrates Sculpture Park, Abrons Art Center, El Museo del Barrio, The Utah Museum of Fine Art’s ACME Lab, and The University of Colorado Art Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego.

Janelle Iglesias
Lorena Mostajo, M.F.A., Assistant Professor

Lorena Mostajo is an artist whose photographic practice spans Mexico and the United States and Bolivia. Her current projects are centered on the ways in which vernacular and historical photographs, national imaginaries, global and local economies and tourism intersect. By looking at these relationships, she examines how images of tourism can simultaneously contain and displace commonly known histories of power relationships and ideas about national culture.

Lorena Mostajo

Taller California
Elizabeth A. Newsome, Ph.D., Associate Professor

Newsome is an expert on the ancient civilizations of Mesoamerica, including the Aztec, Olmec and Izapan cultures.
Rubén Ortiz-Torres M.F.A., Professor

Ortiz-Torres is widely regarded as one of today's leading Mexican Artists and as an innovator in the 1980s.
Mariana Wardwell, Ph.D., Associate Professor

Wardwell's research interests include art history and the overlap of art, politics and theory.

Robert R. Alvarez, Ph.D. Professor- Emeritus

Alvarez is an expert on national and regional identity in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands.
Robert Cancel, Ph.D., Professor - Emeritus
Professor of African and Comparative Literature
Jaime Concha, Ph.D., Professor - Emeritus

Concha is a specialist in 19th Century Latin American intellectual history and Latin American Poetry.
Paul Drake, Ph.D., Professor of – Emeritus

Drake is a distinguished professor and emeritus in Political Science. Drake specializes in Chilean politics and, more generally, Latin American political economy.
David Gutierrez, Ph.D., Professor - Emeritus
His main research interests center on the history of citizenship and civil rights, comparative immigration and ethnic history, and the history of Mexican America.
Louis J. Hock, M.F.A., Professor Emeritus

Hock's research interests include film and video making and public art.

Louis Hock
Jorge Mariscal, Ph.D., Professor - Emeritus

Professor of Spanish and Chicano/a Literature.

Jorge Mariscal
Michael Monteón, Ph.D., Professor of History - Emeritus

Monteón is an expert on Latin America's political economy, who has written on Chile, Mexico, Argentina, Latin American labor and the region's debt crises.
Rosaura Sanchez, Ph.D., Professor - Emeritus
Professor of Latin American Literature and Chicano Literature
Peter H. Smith, Ph. D., Professor - Emeritus

Peter H. Smith, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus of Political Science

Books include Talons of the Eagle: Latin America, the United States, and the World (4^th edition, 2011), Democracy in Latin America: Political Change in Comparative Perspective (2^nd edition, 2012), and Modern Latin America (coauthored, 8^th edition, 2014), all published by Oxford University Press. His works have been translated into Spanish, Portuguese, Korean, and Chinese. He has also written numerous articles and book chapters, many intended for the general public, and for several years he hosted a UCSD-TV talk show about Latin America and its relationship with the United States.

Peter H. Smith
Olga Vásquez, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Communication - Emeritus
Vásquez is an expert on bilingualism and biculturalism, education, literacy, after-school learning and education for the global context.
Carlos Waisman, Ph.D., Professor of Sociology - Emeritus

Waisman is an expert on democratization and the economic and political institutions of the southern cone particularly Argentina.
Winifred Woodhull, Ph.D., Associate Professor - Emeritus
Associate Professor of French
Ana Celia Zentella, Ph.D. - Emeritus

Zentella is one of the foremost researchers in “anthro-political linguistics”; other research interest include bilingualism, child language specialization, Latino Spanish and English Dialect.
Leon Zamosc, Ph.D., Professor - Emeritus
Latin American societies, political economy, development, social movements, research methods, ethnicity, rural sociology.
Max Parra, Ph.D., Associate Professor

Parra's research interests include Latin American Literature, Mexican literature, Caribbean literature, and Indigenismo Narrative.
Misha Kokotovic, Ph.D., Associate Professor

Kokotovic is an expert on Andean Literature and Culture; Central American Literature; Latin American Political Economy and Cultural Theory

Latin American Studies

Affiliated Faculty

Lorena Mostajo, M.F.A., Assistant Professor