Professor Chicanx and Latinx Studies & Chair, Latinx Research Center
Ethnic Studies
Laura Elisa Pérez is professor in the Program of Chicanx Latinx Studies and the Department of Ethnic Studies, and since 2018-19, is Chair of the new interdisciplinary and transAmericas Latinx Research Center, at the University of California, Berkeley. She is a core faculty member of the doctoral program in Performance Studies and of the Department of Women’s Studies, and an affiliated faculty member of the Center for Latin American Studies. Pérez received her Ph.D. from Harvard University with a dissertation focused on the multiple cultural and ideological practices of the literary avant-...
Dr. Ikaika Ramones (Kanaka Maoli) is Assistant Professor in the Department of Ethnic Studies. His research uses anthropological and critical theory frameworks to explore how conceptualizations of indigeneity are remade and contested from within, along what lines, and to what end. His work engages Indigenous Studies, political economy, critical theory, political theory, media studies, and social movements.
His first book, Red Dirt: Class and the Contestations of Indigeneity in Hawaiʻi and Beyond (Princeton University Press, 2026), examines how distinct forms of indigeneity are...
Michelle Vasquez Ruiz is an assistant professor in the Department of Ethnic Studies. She holds a BA in Political Science and Chicano Studies from the University of California, Irvine, and an MA in History from California State University, Los Angeles. She received her PhD in American Studies and Ethnicity from the University of Southern California. Prior to joining UC Berkeley, she was a UC President’s and Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Chicana/o and Central American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Liliana V Rodriguez is an Assistant Professor of Chicanx/Latinx Studies in the Department of Ethnic Studies. She earned her undergraduate and master’s degrees from the University of Texas at Austin and her doctoral degree from the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is a recipient of a Career Enhancement Fellowship for Junior Faculty from the Institute for Citizens and Scholars.
At its core, my research program takes cultural studies approaches to theorize and narrate the interface between race, culture, knowledge, and state power. My work explores race as a “master category” (following Omi and Winant) and as a “medium” (following WJT Mitchell) by crafting comparative, relational, intersectional, and transnational analyses situated in localized and embodied contexts. By turning to the domain of culture, I investigate how power differentials become sedimented and contested in narrative, subject and identity formations, memory, and knowledge production.
Kathleen Whiteley (Wiyot descent) is an assistant professor in the Department of Ethnic Studies. She was born and raised in Eureka, California, and is a descendant of the Wiyot Tribe.
My interdisciplinary humanities-based research broadly examines cultures of imperialism, with a focus on the United States and its colonial territories and interventions in Asia and the Pacific. A central thematic in my work is how race, Indigeneity, gender, and sexuality intersect and operate, sometimes together and sometimes in opposition, in the cultural terrains of empire.
