Faculty - Core

Shari Huhndorf

Class of 1938 Professor of Native American Studies; Coordinator, Native American Studies Program
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:

Fall 2025: Tuesday and Thursday, 4:00-5:00

Program: Native American Studies

Nicholas Vargas

Associate Professor
Ethnic Studies

I am an Associate Professor of Chicanx/Latinx Studies in the Department Ethnic Studies. I am fortunate to co-lead the Latinxs and Democracy Cluster(link is external) at UCB and serve as Faculty Co-Director of the UCB Latino Social Science Pipeline Initiative...

Ida Yalzadeh

Assistant Professor
Ethnic Studies
Asian American and Asian Diaspora Studies

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 (...

Ikaika Ramones

Assistant Professor
Ethnic Studies

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...

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 ...

Lorena Oropeza

Professor and Department Chair
Ethnic Studies

I mostly study people who during the 1960s raised hell because they wanted to stop a war, or fight racial injustice, or overthrow patriarchy. Inspired by these activists, my research and teaching reflect my desire to harness what I consider the subversive potential of history to prompt new ways of thinking among academics and members of the public alike.

Program: Chicanx Latinx Studies, Chicanx History, Gender, Oral History, Race and Empires

Liliana Rodriguez

Ethnic Studies

Kathleen Whiteley

Ethnic Studies

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.

Cheryl Suzack

Ethnic Studies

Professor Cheryl Suzack (Batchewana First Nation) researches and teaches in the areas of Indigenous law and literature, transnational Indigenous studies, Indigenous feminisms, transitional justice, and settler colonial and decolonial studies. She received her PhD from the University of Alberta in 2004 and has held visiting fellowships at the University of Napoli (2023), Smith College (2018), and McGill University (2014). In 2018, she was a Fulbright Fellow at Georgetown University, and from 2016 to 2019, she served as a research collaborator with the Centre for Humanities Research at the...

Keith P. Feldman

Associate Professor
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...