Faculty

Juan David Rubio Restrepo

Assistant Professor
Music

I am an artist/scholar focusing on Latin American popular musics and global experimental practices. My book project considers Ecuadorian singer Julio Jaramillo (1935-1978). Using a transnational and comparative lens, the book analyses Jaramillo’s vocality, prolific discography, mediatized figure, and Pan-American career to query how alterity, media capitalism, sound technologies, and power intertwined in the Spanish-speaking Americas of the second half of the 20th century. Following the politics of circulation of Jaramillo’s voice and figure, I analyze a heterogenous archive to unearth...

Andrew Shanken

Professor
Architecture

Andy Shanken is an architectural and urban historian with an interest in how cultural constructions of memory shape the built environment (and vice versa). He also works on the unbuilt and paper architecture, themed landscapes, heritage and conservation planning; traditions of representation in twentieth-century architecture and planning; keywords in architecture and American culture; and consumer culture and architecture. He is interested in historiography, particularly of architectural history, and the intersection of popular culture and architecture. Since this is too much for one...

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
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)...

Bryan Wagner

Professor / Director of the Folklore Program
English

Bryan Wagner is Director of the Folklore Program as well as Professor in the English Department and Professor in the American Studies Program at the University of California, Berkeley. His research focuses on African American expression in the context of slavery and its aftermath, and he has interests in legal history, vernacular tradition, urban studies, and digital humanities.

His first book, Disturbing the Peace: Black Culture and the Police Power after Slavery (Harvard...

Rhiannon Noel Welch

Associate Professor of Italian Studies; Giovanni and Ruth Elizabeth Cecchetti Chair of Italian Literature
Italian Studies

Rhiannon Noel Welch works on modern Italian literature, film, and critical theory. Her first book, Vital Subjects: Race and Biopolitics in Italy, reads a range of canonical and lesser-known texts through the lens of biopolitics in order to demonstrate how race and colonialism have long been central to Italian modernity and national culture, rather than a fascist aberration or a contemporary phenomenon resulting from immigration.

Her current book project, Crisis and the Aesthetics of Deceleration, examines recurring figures of deceleration, dilation, and/or slowness...