Faculty - Core

Peter Nelson

Assistant Professor
Ethnic Studies

Peter Nelson (Coast Miwok and tribal citizen of the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria) received his PhD in Anthropology from UC Berkeley and is Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies and Environmental Science, Policy, and Management. Professor Nelson works at the intersection of anthropological archaeology, Indigenous environmental studies, and Native American Studies in collaboration with tribal nations and Indigenous peoples in California and abroad on issues of cultural heritage preservation, settler colonialism, climate change, and Indigenous landscape management. Professor Nelson...

Salar Mameni

Assistant Professor
Ethnic Studies

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.

Degree/Education: UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow, Feminist Studies, University of California, Santa Cruz Ph.D., Art History, University of California, San Diego M.A., Art History, University of British Columbia, Vancouver B.F.A., Fine Arts, Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design Programs:...

Long Le-Khac

Assistant Professor
Ethnic Studies

Program: Asian American and Asian Diaspora Studies, Chicanx Latinx Studies

Shari Huhndorf

Class of 1938 Professor
Ethnic Studies
Degree:

Ph.D., Comparative Literature, New York University
M.A., Comparative Literature, New York University
B.A., English, University of Redlands

Office Hours:

Spring 2024: Tuesday and Thursday, 4:00-5:00 and by appointment

Program: Native American Studies, American studies, cultural studies, gender studies, Interdisciplinary Native American studies, literary and visual culture

Catherine Ceniza Choy

Professor
Ethnic Studies
Degree

Ph.D., History, University of California, Los Angeles, June 1998
M.A., History, University of California, Los Angeles, 1993
B.A., History, cum laude, Pomona College, Claremont, 1991

Catherine Ceniza Choy is an award-winning Asian American historian and professor of ethnic studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Asian American Histories of the United States...

Carolyn Chen

Professor
Ethnic Studies
Carolyn Chen received her doctorate in Sociology from UC Berkeley in 2002. Prior to teaching at Berkeley, she was Associate Professor of Sociology and Asian American Studies at Northwestern University, where she served as Director of the Asian American Studies Program. Professor Chen’s research focuses on two areas: work and religion in contemporary America, and religion, race, and ethnicity, especially among Asian Americans. She is author of ...

Thomas Biolsi

Professor
Ethnic Studies

I received my PhD in Anthropology, and most of my research has been conducted on Rosebud Reservation, South Dakota, home of the Sicangu Lakota or Rosebud Sioux. In February 2023, I began collaborative research on the Hoopa Valley Tribe in northern California, which has been in a 7 decade struggle to address the loss of fish in the Trinity River whose water has been diverted to irrigate farms in the Central Valley.

PhD, Anthropology, Columbia University, 1987
BA, Anthropology, Hofstra University, 1975

Program:...

Keith P. Feldman

Associate Professor and Department Chair
Ethnic Studies

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.

My...

Khatharya Um

Associate Dean, Associate Professor
Asian American and Asian Diaspora Studies
Degree/Education

Chancellor's Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellow, University of California, Berkeley
Ph.D. (Political Science), University of California, Berkeley
M.A. (Political Science), University of California, San Diego
B.A. (Political Science), University of California, San Diego

Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez

Professor
Asian American and Asian Diaspora Studies
Asian American literary and cultural studies, Cultures of US Imperialism, Gender and sexuality, Philippine and Filipino American Studies, Transnational American Studies

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.