Alumni

People who have graduated from the program

Kyoko Nagahashi

Folklore

Kyoko Nagahashi (MA 2023) graduated from UC Davis with a background in anthropology and math, where her work centered on aesthetic and medical anthropology, and science-technology-society (STS) perspectives. Building on her interest in medical devices, she plans to explore how such devices enable online “consumers” to construct notions of the body and map boundaries between self, body, and device. A particular focus is on an insulin pump designed for children, and she hopes to investigate how parents use such platforms as Reddit forums to project children's bodies and minds and to...

Shakthi Nakaraj

Folklore, Anthropology

Shakthi Nataraj received her PhD from the Anthropology program at UC Berkeley as well as the MA in Folklore. She examines narratives about sexual identity in Tamil Nadu, India, as they circulate between LGBT rights activists, lawmakers, journalists and novelists. She is especially interested in how older genres of narrative are blended with contemporary ones, producing new visions of sexual identity and politics. Before coming to Berkeley, Shakthi worked with two gender and sexuality rights NGOs in Chennai, Tamil Nadu. She is currently a lecturer at Lancaster University.

Bob Offer-Westort

Folklore

Bob Offer-Westort came to the Folklore MA (2020) program from over a decade of community organising in homeless communities in San Francisco and Berkeley. He's interested in the internal structure of narrative, how received narratives in turn condition our personal and political lives, and how stories change in movement between narrative communities and through time. His research focuses on the region between the Nile and the Red Sea. Bob holds a BA in Social Anthropology from Long Island University. He is currently a PhD student in Anthropology at the University of Chicago.

Samuel Puliafico

Folklore

Samuel Puliafico (MA 2017) is a Southern California native who earned his undergraduate degree from UC Irvine in 2014. While at UC Irvine his research focused on spectacle and performance in American state fairs, festivals, and carnival. After earning his degree in Cultural Anthropology, he spent a year living and working in Ireland. Samuel is currently researching children’s folklore, and he is specifically interested in the aesthetic and design elements of children’s play objects and how they relate to the concept of play studies. Additionally, he is interested in culture...

Molly Robinson

Folklore

Molly (MA 2021) joined the Folklore Program to explore the material and cultural histories of the so-called American South. She examines how these histories are brought to life in Gullah figurative painting and other art forms created in the part of the southeastern United States vernacularly dubbed the “Coastal Empire.” These interests issue from a broader concern with how we might learn to see legacies of difference, diasporic identities, and articulations of political desire through representation of Southern bodies in art. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Anthropology from the...

Leah Simon

Folklore

Leah (MA 2021) arrived from New York City after finishing her undergraduate work at the NYU Gallatin School of Individualized Study. A current member of the Folklore program at U.C. Berkeley, she is motivated to research how nationalism and visual media inform sexual subjectivities. In her current research, she examines libidinal identities and their implications in practices of global gentrification. She hopes to better understand how popular perceptions of gender, authenticity, and sexuality have been discursively shaped in the past by the present and in the present by the past....

Nalin Sindhurprama

Folklore

Nalin (MA 2022) received her BA from Chulalongkorn University in Thai language and literature with a focus on folklore. After graduating, she began researching the two decades that have ensued since the violence of the Khmer Rouge government in neighboring Cambodia. For her MA Thesis, she plans to conduct fieldwork on how Cambodians born after 1979 engage with narratives of the Khmer Rouge years that appear in memoirs, novels, films, comic books, political discourse, and official narratives. Her particular interest lies in how this generation uses media, including social media, to...

Tok Thompson

Folklore, Anthropology

Tok Thompson was born and raised in rural Alaska. At the age of 17, he began attending Harvard College, where he received his bachelor’s degree in Anthropology. In 1999 he received a Master’s degree in Folklore from the University of California, Berkeley, and three years later received a PhD in Anthropology from the same institution, all the while studying under the late great folklorist Alan Dundes.

After receiving his PhD, Tok engaged in a two-year postdoctoral position with the Centre for Irish-Scottish Studies at Trinity College, Dublin, where he helped...

Brenda Umutoniwase

Folklore

Brenda Umutoniwase (MA 2023) joined the Folklore Program at UC Berkeley after finishing her undergraduate degree from Cornell University in International agriculture and rural development and Africana Studies. A member of Sistah Circle Collective, a radical black feminist Collective based and doing work in Rwanda, she comes into her research with this community in mind. Her primary interests lie in interrogating how gender and sexuality are in constant interaction with culture within colonial spaces in East Africa (what’s commonly referred to as the post-colonial African State). With...

Elaine Yau

Folklore

Elaine Y. Yau is Associate Curator of the Eli Leon Living Trust Collection of African American Quilts at the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA); where she is curating an exhibition from Leon’s historic bequest of approximately 3,000 quilts. She co-curated Rosie Lee Tompkins: A Retrospective in 2020 with Larry Rinder, an exhibition deepened her long-standing engagement with art at the intersections of craft, vernacular culture, and modernism. She has published on artists such as Gertrude Morgan and Minnie Evans, and...