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.
I am an interdisciplinary historian who thinks about the relationship between race and empire. I engage in the fields of diplomatic history, Asian American Studies, and Critical SWANA Studies, and more specifically, Iranian Diaspora Studies.
Publications:
“Post-Revolutionary Iranians in the Philippines: Toward Decentering the United States in Asian/American Studies,” American Quarterly 77: 4 (2025), (forthcoming).
“After the Battle of Beverly Hills: U.S. Government Surveillance of Iranian International Students in the Cold War,” Diplomatic History 48:2 (...
Dr. Ramones is a first-generation scholar from Kalihi, O‘ahu. He holds a BA in Social Anthropology from Harvard University, and an MPhil and PhD in Anthropology from New York University. Prior to joining UC Berkeley, Dr. Ramones was an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University.
Publications: Red Dirt: Dialectics of Indigeneity (Book manuscript under contract with Princeton University Press)
Forthcoming “‘Class Assimilation’: Racialization, Class, and Indigeneity in Hawaiʻi.” in Current Anthropology
2024 “‘Insurgent Indigeneity’: A New Threshold of...
