Faculty

Minoo Moallem

Professor
Gender and Women's Studies

Minoo Moallem is a professor of Gender and Women's Studies.

Professor Moallem received her MA and BA from the University of Tehran and her Ph.D. from Université de Montréal. She has also done postdoctoral studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She was the Chair of Gender and Women’s Studies Department at Berkeley from 2008-2010 and the Chair of the Women’s Studies Department at San Francisco State University from 2001-2006.

Professor Moallem is the author of Persian Carpets: The Nation As a Transnational Commodity, Routledge, 2018; Between Warrior...

Asta Mønsted

Assistant Professor
Scandinavian

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

Senior Lecturer
American Studies

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.

Poulomi Saha

Associate Professor
English
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...

Candace Slater

Professor
Spanish and Portuguese

Candace Slater is an American academic and researcher specializing in Brazilian literature and culture.

Her primary area of research has been folk and popular traditions in Brazil, in other countries in Latin America and on the Iberian Peninsula....

Carolyn Smith

Assistant Professor
Folklore, Anthropology

Carolyn Smith is an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology. She is an enrolled member-descendant of the Karuk Tribe. Funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation Dissertation Fieldwork Grant, she has recently completed a PhD in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. Her dissertation, Weaving pikyav (to-fix-it): Karuk Basket Weaving Practice in-Relation-with the Everyday World, addresses the question of how baskets come into being and how they are living entities that need to be with their people. Through interviews, museum collection and...

Sameer Srivastava

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, ...

Jun Sunseri

Associate Professor
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...

Timothy Tangherlini

Professor / 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...

Leti Volpp

Robert D. and Leslie Kay Raven Professor of Law in Access to Justice
Berkeley Law
is a scholar of immigration law and citizenship theory whose research examines how law is shaped by culture and identity. Her most recent publications include “Protecting the Nation from ‘Honor Killings’: the Construction of a Problem(opens in a new tab)” in Constitutional Commentary (2019), “Refugees Welcome?(opens in a new tab)...