Asta Mønsted is a prehistoric archaeologist educated at the University of Copenhagen. She joined the Berkeley faculty in 2024. Asta was born and raised in Uummannaq, North Greenland. She has done field work in both North, West and South Greenland, but also in Denmark, Germany, and Japan.
Christine Palmer is the Associate Director of the Program in American Studies, where her research and teaching focus on the interplay between race, visual culture, literature, and cultural memory in twentieth-century popular and mass culture. In addition to studying folk etymologies and ethnic jokes, she has worked on mythology, märchen, and monsters.
Co-Director of the Program in Critical Theory, Poulomi Saha works at the intersections of American studies, psychoanalytic critique, feminist and queer theory, and postcolonial studies. They are interested in questions of racialization, regulation of gender and sexuality, and politics of resistance -- from the late 19th century decline of British colonial rule in the Indian Ocean through to the Pacific and the rise of American global power in the 20th century. Currently, they're finishing a book about our abiding and potent obsessions with cults. Fascination is a state of rapt unbelief—the...
Ewald T. Grether Professor of Business Administration and Public Policy
Haas School of Business
Sameer B. Srivastava is the Ewald T. Grether Professor of Business Administration and Public Policy at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. He is also affiliated with UC Berkeley Sociology.
His research uses computational methods to: (1) unpack the complex interrelationships between group culture, individual cognition, and interpersonal networks; and (2) examine how they jointly relate to individual attainment and organizational performance. His work has been published in such journals as American Journal of Sociology, American Sociological Review, ...
Associate Professor (Folklore Faculty as of January 2025)
Anthropology
My research focuses on colonialism, foodways, landscapes, historical archaeology, preservation and heritage in the western US and northern South Africa. Members of my research cluster bring together complementary lines of evidence of varied types and spatial scales, including analysis of archaeological ceramic and faunal assemblages related to domestic foodways and GIS analysis of remote sensing, geophysical survey, and excavation data to reveal tactical, engineering, and ritual patterning of cultural landscapes. By placing these suites of data in dialogue with each other, we seek more...
Professor / Director of the Graduate Program / Elizabeth H. and Eugene A. Shurtleff Chair in Undergraduate Education
Scandinavian & School of Information
Professor Tangherlini’s research focuses on folklore and aspects of informal culture in Scandinavia, with a primary focus on Denmark. A folklorist and ethnographer by training, he has worked extensively on understanding the circulation of informal storytelling in both agrarian and urban communities and the manner in which stories both reflect and inform changes in social, economic, and political organization. He has developed various computational methods for the study of topic change and geographic distribution in large folklore corpora. These include standard descriptive statistical...
Bryan Wagner is Professor in the English Department at the University of California, Berkeley. His research focuses on African American expression in the context of slavery and its aftermath, and he has specific interests in legal history, vernacular culture, urban studies, and digital humanities.
His first book, Disturbing the Peace: Black Culture and the Police Power after Slavery (Harvard University Press, 2009), offers a new theory of black vernacular tradition based on the tradition’s historical engagement with criminal law. By interpreting outlaw legends and blues...
My work has always been closely engaged with stakeholder communities. I have long been concerned about how to make archaeological knowledge accessible and widely available to a range of interdisciplinary and public audiences. I have worked closely with community heritage groups in Louisiana, California, Alabama and the Bahamas, collaborating with descendent groups, local museums and state agencies.
My current research (with Dr Dan Hicks, Oxford University explores the history of the modern preservation movements in New York City and London. This research aims to rewrite traditional...
