Faculty, Professional Affiliates, and Staff

Charisma Acey

City and Regional Planning

Charisma Acey is Associate Professor of City and Regional Planning. Her background includes work, research and travel to countries in West Africa, southern Africa and Central America. Her work focuses on local and regional environmental sustainability, with a focus on poverty reduction, urban governance and access to basic services. Her work relies on both quantitative and participatory, qualitative research approaches to understanding individual and household demand for improved infrastructure and environmental amenities. Read more.

Email: charisma.acey@berkeley.edu

Juan G. Berumen

Ethnic Studies

Juan has a passion for positioning research as a tool to transform society and institutionalize social justice. With a PhD in Education Policy Studies from Indiana University, Berumen teaches in the Department of Ethnic Studies. Over the past 15 years, Juan has assessed policy implementation for university and statewide initiatives, conducted policy research for a California state assembly campaign, consulted for community-based organizations and schools, and advocated for equity on the national level. He is also a playwright and member of the theater group Campo Santo. Read more.

Email: jgberumen@berkeley.edu

Anna Livia Brand

Landscape Architecture and Environmental Design

Anna Livia Brand is Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning. Her research focuses on the intersection of race and space, specifically looking at historic black mecca neighborhoods and how they change through processes of gentrification and resistance. Her comparative research focuses on cities in the American North and South, including New Orleans, Houston, Atlanta, Chicago and New York. This work highlights the ongoing spatial impacts of racial processes and resistance to these processes over time and evaluates the role that urban planning and design plays. Brand focuses on interpretations of everyday landscapes and the built environment and she is interested in the ways that people shape and create a place for themselves in urban environments and the ways that they imagine more just places and communities. Read more.

Email:annalivia@berkeley.edu

Anthony Cascardi

Comparative Literature, Rhetoric, Spanish & Portuguese

Anthony J. Cascardi is Dean of Arts and Humanities at the University of California, Berkeley. He is also Professor of Comparative Literature, Rhetoric, and Spanish. He is former Director of the Townsend Center for the Humanities and of the Arts Research Center. Cascardi’s research interests include the relations between literature and philosophy; aesthetic theory; the novel; and early modern Europe. His recent publications include the two edited volumes “Art and Aesthetics After Adorno” and “Poiesis and Modernity,” and the books “Cervantes, Literature, and the Discourse of Politics” and “The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and Philosophy.” Read more.

Email: ajcascardi@berkeley.edu

Erika Chong Shuch

Performance Maker, Choreographer

Erika Chong Shuch is a performance maker, choreographer and director whose topic-driven ruminations coalesce into imagistic assemblages of music, movement, text, and design. Interested in expanding ideas around how performance is created and shared, Erika’s work has been performed in city halls, theaters, industrial offices spaces, diners, parking lots and food courts. Moving between theater, experimental performance and social practice, Erika’s projects bring together interdisciplinary communities in the spirit of creative research. Erika’s most recent body of work is presented through For You, a performance making collective that Erika founded in 2016 which brings strangers together for intimate encounters and considers performance making as gift giving.  As a response to worldwide shelter-in-place ordinances due to COVID-19, and with awareness that many elders are at risk in terms of infection and the compounding hardships of isolation, For You launched Artists & Elders, a project that brings artists and elders together for shared creative exchange.  Artists & Elders is being supported in part by commissions from Court Theatre and Experimental Performance Initiative (University of Chicago) and Oregon Shakespeare Festival. As a choreographer and director for theater, Erika is a full member of the Choreographer and Stage Directors Union and  has worked for regional theaters across the country. Read More.

Email: erikachongshuch@gmail.com

Catherine Elizabeth Covey

Architecture

As a broadly trained social scientist, urban historian, and university-level educator, Catherine Covey is fascinated by human environments and the ways people inhabit, claim, and reimagine homes, social spaces, and the public realm. Her research is framed by the interplay between the physical construction of cities and ideological landscapes. Covey has PhD in Architecture and Urbanism from UC Berkeley and is a lecturer in the Department of Architecture. Read more.

Lincoln Cushing

Archivist

Lincoln Cushing has at various times been a printer, artist, archivist, author, and U.C. Berkeley librarian. He is involved in numerous efforts to document, catalog, and disseminate oppositional political culture of the late 20th century. His books include Revolucion! Cuban Poster Art (2003), Visions of Peace & Justice: 30 Years of Political Posters from the Archives of Inkworks Press (2007), Chinese Posters: Art from the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, (2007), Agitate! Educate! Organize! – American Labor Posters (2009), and an essay in Ten Years That Shook The City — San Francisco 1968-1978 (2011). Read more.

Chiyuma Elliott

African American Studies

Chiyuma Elliott is Assistant Professor of African American Studies. Her scholarly work and teaching focus on poetry and poetics, African American literature, intellectual history from the 1920s to the present, and Black Geography/Cultural Geography. Before joining the Berkeley faculty, Elliott was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford. She earned her M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Warren Wilson College and her Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Texas at Austin. Elliott is the author of three books of poems: At Most (2020), Vigil (2017), and California Winter League (2015). Her poems and essays have appeared in the African American Review, Callaloo, the Collagist, the Notre Dame Review, the PN Review, and other journals. Read more.

Email: chiyuma@berkeley.edu

Pablo Gonzalez

Ethnic Studies

Pablo Gonzalez is a first-generation Chicano scholar-activist/anthropologist who studies the political and cultural resonance of social movements.  He is a Continuing Lecturer in Chicano/Latino Studies. His current research looks at the effects of the post 2008 housing crisis on Latino and Black families including dispossession caused by foreclosures, forced migrations, and homelessness.  He also looks at the logics of race and capital that inform the prevalent forms of social organization around private property. Read more.

Email: aztlan71@berkeley.edu

June Grant

Architecture

June Grant received her Masters degree in Architecture from the Yale School of Architecture. In addition to Architecture, her background includes Sculpture, Investment Analysis and Economics.  Grant launched blink!LAB in 2014. Her architecture follows a trajectory from retail to culture and technology markets. She is an architect with a long interest in innovation of spaces for newly emerging social patterns. Read more.

Email: jgrant@blink-lab.com

Sara Guyer

English; Dean of Arts & Humanities, Co-Principal Investigator, Future Histories Lab

Sara Guyer is a professor of English, affiliate of the Center for Jewish Studies, and also serves as President of the international Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes(link is external) and director of The World Humanities Report(link is external).  She has designed international programs to foster collaborative research on pressing issues including democracy, climate change, migration, and health inequality. Until August 2021, she was Dorothy Puestow Draheim Professor of English and Jewish Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she directed the Center for the Humanities. She is the author of Romanticism after Auschwitz (2007) and Reading with John Clare: Biopoetics, Sovereignty, Romanticism (2015) and co-editor of the book series Lit Z. She received her Ph.D. in Rhetoric from UC Berkeley.

Email: seguyer@berkeley.edu

Lynne Horiuchi

Architecture

Lynne Horiuchi is an architectural historian who received her Ph.D. in 2005 from the University of California at Santa Barbara. Her work is cross-disciplinary, examining concepts of imprisonment, race, space, mobility, everyday racism, and civil justice. She is currently writing a book on the production of the prison camps built for Japanese Americans, Dislocations and Relocations: Building Prison Cities for Japanese and Japanese Americans during World War II (University of Washington Press, forthcoming). Read more.

Email: clhoriuchi@gmail.com

Shelby Kendrick

Architecture

Shelby Kendrick is a Graduate Student Researcher for Future Histories Lab and a doctoral student of architecture in the CED’s History, Theory, and Society program. Shelby is also an environmental analyst, architectural historian, and public historian. Her academic interests include historic preservation, history and theory of modern architecture, and political ecology in the United States. Her research investigates the historical sedimentation of Modernism and California’s environmental and preservation movements. This work focuses on spatiotemporal and sociological impacts of public participation in development, planning, and historic preservation processes. Shelby assists Future Histories Lab in programmatic work and research on the Year on Angel Island Project and affiliated courses.

Email: shelby_kendrick@berkeley.edu

Jovan Scott Lewis

Geography

Jovan Scott Lewis is Assistant Professor of African-American Studies and Geography and co-chair of the Economic Disparities Research Cluster at Berkeley’s Othering and Belonging Institute. His research examines race through the economic ethics, rationalizations, and practices that organize the lived experience of poverty and inequality in the Caribbean and the United States. His work in Jamaica, where he researched what he called the “sufferation” economy, explored the social practices and cultural forms that facilitate the locating, reconciling, and normalizing of structural economic and social inequality through local market frames. His current research in Tulsa, Oklahoma is concerned with the structural and infrastructural frictions of poverty. Read more.

Email: jovan@berkeley.edu

Margaretta Lin

Law, Public Policy and Administration, Advocacy

Margaretta Lin is a social and racial justice impact innovator in urban planning, public policy, education, community development, and law. Margaretta serves as the founding Executive Director of Just Cities, a racial justice planning, policy, and organizing platform, and founding Director of the Dellums Institute for Social Justice.  She has served as the City of Oakland’s Deputy City Administrator and founding Director of Strategic Initiatives and was founding Director of the East Bay Community Law Center’s Community Economic Justice practice, the founding Director of Youth Together, and Staff Attorney at Public Advocates.  Margaretta has a JD and Masters in Asian Studies from UC Berkeley and a BA in Religious and Asian Studies from the University of Virginia.

Email: margaretta@justcities.work

Jill Miller

Art Practice

Jill Miller is a visual artist whose research is centered on socially engaged art and public practices. She works with individuals and local communities in the form of public interventions, workshops, and participatory community projects. Her work prioritizes placemaking as a vital component of public art, and her projects use cooperative strategies to engage publics and galvanize their efforts to become more connected, engaged citizens. Her research explores community-building in both physical places and virtual sites, often bridging the gap between the two. Read More.

Email: jillmiller@berkeley.edu

Susan Moffat

City and Regional Planning; Creative Director, Future Histories Lab; Executive Director, Global Urban Humanities Initiative

Susan Moffat is a curator, urban planner and writer who works at the intersection of culture, nature and place, with a special interest in race, parks, and public space.  As Creative Director of Future Histories Lab and Executive Director of the Global Urban Humanities Initiative, she leads the development of community partnerships, courses, and workshops and teaches humanities studios. A former journalist, she has a deep belief in the power of stories to make change. She worked in affordable housing, environmental advocacy and shoreline planning.  Moffat is the founder and executive director of Love the Bulb, an arts organization dedicated to protecting the creative spirit of the Albany Bulb landfill. She has an AB in History and Literature from Harvard University, an MS in Journalism from Columbia University, and a Master in City Planning from UC Berkeley. Read more.

Email: susanmoffat@berkeley.edu

Liam O’Donoghue

Journalism

Liam O’Donoghue is the host and producer of the East Bay Yesterday podcast and co-creator of the Long Lost Oakland map. His journalism has appeared in outlets such as KQED Arts, Berkeleyside, Open Space, KALW-FM, Mother Jones, Salon, East Bay Express, and the syndicated NPR program Snap Judgement. In 2018, he was honored by the East Bay Express as “the best journalist-turned-historian” and presented with a “Partners in Preservation Award” from Oakland Heritage Alliance.  Read more.

Email: eastbayyesterday@gmail.com

Susan Schweik

English

Susan Schweik is an English professor. Her scholarly and activist work for the last ten years has concerned the long and ongoing history of eugenics. Her last book was The Ugly Laws: Disability in Public; she’s now completing a book tentatively titled Unfixed: How the Women of Glenwood Asylum Overturned Ideas about IQ, & Why You Don’t Know About Their Work. A recipient of Berkeley’s Chancellor’s Award for Advancing Institutional Excellence, U.C.’s Presidential Chair in Undergraduate Education, and a Distinguished Teaching Award, she has been involved with the development of disability studies at Berkeley for 25 years. Read more.

Email: sschweik@berkeley.edu

Brandi Thompson Summers

Geography

Brandi Thompson Summers is Assistant Professor of Geography and of Global Metropolitan Studies. Her research engages theoretical themes that cut across multiple domains of social life. She builds on epistemological and methodological insights from cultural and urban geography, urban sociology, African American studies, and media studies by examining the cultural, political, and economic dynamics by which race and space are reimagined and reordered. Read more.

Email: btsummers@berkeley.edu

Stephanie Syjuco

Art Practice

Stephanie Syjuco is Associate Professor of Art Practice and works in photography, sculpture, and installation, moving from handmade and craft-inspired mediums to digital editing. Her projects explore the tension between the authentic and the counterfeit, challenging deep-seated assumptions about history, race, and labor. Syjuco’s installations frequently invite viewers to be active participants in order to investigate global consumerism and capitalism. Through photographic portraits composed in the studio, Syjuco further explores economies of labor and value, with a political dimension inspired by colonialist ethnographic photography, her background as an immigrant, and media-filtered protest imagery.  Read more.

Email: ssyjuco@berkeley.edu

Ray Telles

Ethnic Studies, Filmmaking

Raymond Telles’ twenty-five year career in film and television includes the production of documentaries and news magazine segments. He has produced and directed for Public Television, Turning Point and Nightline-ABC, Dateline- NBC. His independent productions include films for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), and the Independent Television Service (ITVS). He teaches filmmaking in the Department of Ethnic Studies. Read more.

Email: rtelles@berkeley.edu

Nicolette Watt

English & Political Science, Communications Assistant

Nicolette is an undergraduate student double-majoring in English and Political Science. A lifelong member of the performing arts community with a background in government work, Nicolette is excited about the many intersections of politics, art, and storytelling Future Histories Lab explores. She manages the website, social media, and communications for Future Histories Lab.

Email: nickiwatt@berkeley.edu

Jennifer Wolch

City and Regional Planning; Dean Emerita, City and Regional Planning; Co-Principal Investigator Future Histories Lab and Global Urban Humanities Initiative

Jennifer Wolch is a scholar of urban analysis and planning. Her past work focused on urban homelessness and the delivery of affordable housing and human services for poor people. She has also studied urban sprawl and alternative approaches to city-building such as smart growth and new urbanism. An early investigator of animal-society relations in cities, she has proposed strategies for human-animal co-existence in an urbanizing world. Her most recent work analyzes connections between city form, physical activity, and public health, and develops strategies to address environmental justice issues by improving access to urban parks and recreational resources. A Professor of City and Regional Planning, she is Dean Emerita of the College of Environmental Design. Read more.

Email: wolch@berkeley.edu

Winnie Wong

Rhetoric and Art History

Winnie Wong is Associate Professor in Rhetoric and History of Art. Her theoretical interests revolve around the critical distinctions of high and low, true and fake, art and commodity, originality and imitation, and conceptual and manual labor. Her book, Van Gogh On Demand: China and the Readymade  is a study of Dafen village, China, the world’s largest production center for oil-on-canvas painting. The book evaluates the postmodern valorization of creativity and appropriation in globalist artistic discourses. She is currently researching the work of anonymous Canton painters within the larger Qing engagement with European painting.  She co-edited a multidisciplinary volume on the urban history and anthropology of Shenzhen, entitled Learning from Shenzhen: China’s Post-Mao Experiment from Special Zone to Model City,  and co-taught with Margaret Crawford the Global Urban Humanities research studio documented on this website: Art+Village+City in the Pearl River Delta. Work from the studio was exhibited at the Shanghai Biennale 2015 and at Wurster Hall on Berkeley campus.

Email: wwyw@berkeley.edu