Our Faculty
Interdisciplinary Humanities
ANTHROPOLOGY AND HERITAGE STUDIES
robin delugan**
Professor DeLugan's research focuses on nation-state, national belonging, race-ethnicity-nation, migration-transnationalism-diaspora, social memory (especially museums, monuments & commemorations, and community-engaged scholarship.
Email: rdelugan@ucmerced.edu
holley moyes
Professor Moyes' research focuses on the archaeology of religion, cave archaeology, Mesoamerica, dynamics of complex society, geographic information systems, Spatial cognition, and cognitive science affiliate.
Email: hmoyes@ucmerced.edu
linda-anne rebhun
Professor Rebhun is a professor of cultural and medical anthropology with interests in medical and cultural anthropology, gender roles, maternal and child health, Folklore, folk medicine, religion, folk Catholicism, Latin America, Brazil, African diaspora, race and color in Latin America, ethnomedicine, ethnopsychology, cross-cultural emotions, couple formation and romantic love.
Email: lrebuhn@ucmerced.edu
karl ryavec
Professor Ryavec specializes in historical geography, historical GIS, cartography, and heritage conservation. His research focuses on the historical geography of Tibet and its surrounding regions, particularly the development of monastic urban systems, ritual economies, trade networks, and cultural landscapes. His work integrates historical sources, geographic information systems, spatial modeling, and digital cartography to reconstruct regional systems and examine the relationships between religion, economy, and the built environment. His interests also encompass historical atlases, and the development of open-access geospatial datasets for interdisciplinary research.
Email: kryavec@ucmerced.edu
Daniel Thompson
Professor Thompson studies borders, mobility, and urbanization, with a focus on cultural-economic practices through which people sustain their livelihoods. His current projects seek to understand how the global trade and cultivation of African native plants has reshaped the Horn of Africa's borderlands, as well as to advance community-driven projects in ecological protection and revegetation. He is the author of Smugglers, Speculators, and the City in the Ethiopia-Somalia Borderlands (Cambridge, 2025) and African Border Worlds: Stories of Precarity and Possibility (Bloomsbury, 2027).
Email: daniel.thompson@ucmerced.edu
Stephen Wooding
Professor Wooding studies evolutionary genetics with a specific focus upon obtaining a deeper understanding of the genetics of taste perception and how such an understanding can be used to study a variety of health related issues
Email: swooding@ucmerced.edu
Beth Scaffidi
Professor Scaffidi is a spatially-oriented bioarchaeologist who studies human responses to environmental and cultural stresses by reconstructing health, dietary changes, and changes in residential mobility with osteological, isotopic, geospatial, and big data methods. Her past bioarcheological research has focused on the pre-Wari era and state formation processes in southern Peru, while her new project examines the impacts of Wari imperial dissolution and water scarcity on health and social practices. Dr. Scaffidi runs the Skeletal and Environmental Isotope Laboratory, where she conducts stable and radiogenic isotope analysis of archaeological and environmental reference materials.
Email: cscaffidi@ucmerced.edu
CRITICAL RACE AND ETHNIC STUDIES (CRES)
Nicosia Shakes
Professor Shakes specializes in Africana /Black performance and popular culture; Africana/Black gender and sexuality, including feminisms and womanism; and Black radicalism in the Americas. Her book is titled, Women's Activist Theatre in Jamaica and South Africa: Gender, Race and Performance Space (University of Illinois Press, 2023).
Email: nshakes@ucmerced.edu
Christina baker
Professor Baker's research interests center on the intersection of race and gender, with an emphasis on Black feminism, media representations of Blackness, and experiences of women of color in film/media, higher education, and other social institutions. She is an author of Contemporary Black Women Filmmakers and the Art of Resistance (The Ohio State University Press) and Black Women Directors (Rutgers University Press).
Email: cbaker26@ucmerced.edu
Sapana doshi
Professor Doshi's research focuses on embodiment, somatics and social justice, critical development studies, urban studies, & critical corruption studies.
Email: sdoshi3@ucmerced.edu
Blythe George
Professor George’s (Yurok) work centers on trauma, meaning, and resilience on rural tribal reservations, drawing from in-depth interviews, ethnography, and data sovereignty to insert the experience of Indigenous communities into the study of marginalization.
Email: blythegeorge@ucmerced.edu
kit myers
Professor Myers focuses on critical race & ethnic studies, critical adoption studies, American studies, legal studies, Asian American studies, family and kinship studies, and critical pedagogy. He is the author of The Violence of Love: Race, Family, and Adoption in the United States (University of California Press, 2025, open access). Read more about his work at https://sites.ucmerced.edu/kitmyers/.
Email: kmyers6@ucmerced.edu
ma vang
Professor Vang's research interests include pedagogy, critical race and ethnic studies, critical refugee studies, Southeast Asian and Asian American histories and cultures, Hmong American Studies, U.S. war and militarism.
Email: mvang53@ucmerced.edu
Jinah Kim
Jinah Kim is the McClatchy Endowed Professor of Communications and Program Chair of Communication and Media. She is a media and critical race studies scholar whose research and teaching focuses on the American Century in Asia, decolonizing Korea, transpacific feminist activism, and legacies of US militarism in the Asia-Pacific. Her work explores state regulations of memory surrounding histories of violence, and in turn how artists, activists and everyday people intervene against permanent war, state violence, and military occupation. She is the author of Postcolonial Grief and the Afterlife of the Pacific Wars in the Americas (Duke UP, 2019). She is currently working on two book projects: Against Forgetting: Mediated Witnessing for the Comfort Women (under review by Duke University Press) and Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Korea, under contract with Duke UP.
Email: jinahkim@ucmerced.edu
LITERATURES IN ENGLISH
humberto garcia**
Professor Garcia is the Vincent Hillyer Chair and Professor of Literature at the University of California, Merced who specializes in British Romanticism and eighteenth-century literature, with a focus on Romantic Orientalism, postcolonial criticism, and global/transnational studies.
Email: hgarcia22@ucmerced.edu
Professor Hatton's research is at the intersections of literature and philosophy, aesthetics and social theory, and the interplay of imaginative textual forms and the history of ideas, with additional emphases on human rights & literature, political theory, and existentialist thought. Interests in these ideas are always contextualized by the sites where Professor Hatton physically works, teaches, pressures, and writes about the discursive and textual—places like the university, clinic, tribunal, prison, NGO, natural park, and street.
Email: nhatton@ucmerced.edu
Weisong Gao
Professor Gao's research interests include queer theory, queer ecology, environmental humanities, diaspora, queer literature and films.
Email: wgao4@ucmerced.edu
Fatima Burney
Professor Burney's research focuses on poetic theory, global romanticism, world literature, and Islamicate literary history.
Email: fburney@ucmerced.edu
mai-linh hong
Professor Hong is a literary and cultural studies scholar specializing in Asian American literature, critical refugee studies, and law and humanities. Current research examines the conditions of refugee storytelling amid the global legal regimes that govern refugee migration and aid. Other research and teaching interests include poetry, contemporary American literature, critical race theory, human rights, women-of-color feminism, and mutual aid activism.
Email: hongm@ucmerced.edu
matthew kaiser
Professor Kaiser's research interests include Nineteenth-century British literature and culture, Cognitive approaches to the study of literature, and Gender and sexuality studies.
Email: mkaiser2@ucmerced.edu
Felicia Rhapsody Lopez
Felicia Lopez’s research focuses on Indigenous cultures, language, and texts, with an emphasis on religious traditions, gender, and the decipherment of Nahua-Mixteca glyphic writing. Her work fuses disciplinary methods from ethnic studies, decolonial studies, anthropology, linguistics, art history, and literature. Her courses primarily explore literature and historical accounts from Indigenous, Chicana/o, Latina/o, and other BIPOC authors. Her current in-progress manuscript uncovers the significance of women as religious and community leaders among the Aztecs and other Nahua groups, through an examination of Indigenous-authored texts (glyphic and alphabetic) written before and in the decades immediately following the Spanish invasion of Mexico.
Email: flopez44@ucmerced.edu
GLOBAL ARTS
lorena alvarado
Lorena Alvarado is a writer and interdisciplinary scholar working at the intersection of Chicane/Latine Studies, Feminisms of Color and Performance and Popular Music Studies, with an emphasis on the cultural politics of Popular Mexican/American popular music and feminist life writing. Her current book project, Playing with Feeling, examines the cancion ranchera’s emotive aesthetics, applying a feminist analysis to performances by Chavela Vargas and Chayito Valdez, among other foundational ranchera luminaries. Her work has appeared in venues that include women and performance, The Journal of Popular Music Studies, and the Routledge Companion to Latina/o Media. [Please remove the tag "musicology" currently under my name. thank you]
Email: lalvarado10@ucmerced.edu
jayson beaster-jones
Jayson Beaster-Jones is ethnomusicologist and anthropologist whose work focuses upon the music industry of India, media industries, semiotics, and community-engaged research. He is the author of several books, including Bollywood Sounds (2015) and Music, Commodities, Markets, and Values (2016), and The Dil Chahta Hai Soundtrack (2024). In addition to his work on media industries of India, he created and has co-directs (with Patricia Vergara) the Gateway to Merced Project, a community-engaged oral history project that collects and archives the stories of Merced County residents belonging to diverse linguistic and geographical communities.
Email: jbeaster-jones@ucmerced.edu
aditi chandra**
Professor Chandra is a scholar of the art, architecture, and visual culture of the Islamic world (with a focus on South Asia). Professor Chandra's teaching and research attempt to push the disciplinary boundaries of art history by engaging with a wide range of popular visualities and spatial experiences.
Email: achandra4@ucmerced.edu
maria deprano
Professor DePrano is an art historian of the Italian Renaissance with a specialty in fifteenth-century Florence. Professor DePRano focuses on gender, the domestic interior, material culture, and artisans.
Email: mdeprano@ucmerced.edu
Jiajun liang
Professor Liang's specialty lies in modern Japanese literature, film, and popular culture, with particular attention to the representation of memories and traumas of colonial violence through a transnational lens.
Email: jliang75@ucmerced.edu
David kaminsky
Professor Kaminsky studies music and dance as they relate to race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class, and nationalism. His work engages with the modern blues dancing scene, history and politics of the lead/follow system in social partner dancing, non-Jewish klezmer music in Europe, Swedish folk revivalism, and the intersection of antisemitism studies with theories of intersectionality.
Email: dkaminsky@ucmerced.edu
patricia vergara
Professor Vergara's research examines the routes of Mexican corridos (narrative ballads) to and across Colombia from the 1930s to the present through processes that emerged in contexts of political violence, rural-urban migrations, and changing technologies of musical production and distribution. Situating the emergence of Mexican-inspired music practices in relation to the consolidation of Colombian national and regional styles throughout the twentieth century, her work outlines the ways in which modes of listening are constituted discursively and effectively, revealing deep rifts between official constructions of citizenship and popular sentiments of belonging among Colombians disenfranchised by many forms of everyday violence. Vergara contributed a chapter to the edited volume La Música Norteña Mexicana, published in 2014 by Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH), and has presented her work at national and international conferences.
Email: pvergara2@ucmerced.edu
shipu wang**
Professor Wang's research interests are 20th-century American and Asian art, American modernism and its global impact, Asian-American art, Museum collections and curatorial practices, and Visual culture.
Email: swang7@ucmerced.edu
kenichi yoshida**
Professor Yoshida's current work focuses on the discursive and aesthetic role of “matter” in postwar avant-garde art to demonstrate that artists in the 1950s to the 1970s consistently critiqued humanism and biopolitics. He is working on his book manuscript tentatively titled "Between Matter and Ecology: Art in Postwar Japan and the Question of Totality."
Yoshida has also worked as a translator for "Primary Documents: Japanese Art Criticism 1945-1989" (MoMA: November 2012). His article “The Undulating Contours of Sogo Geijutsu (gesamkunstwerk), or Hanada Kiyoteru’s Thoughts on Transmedia” was published in the March 2012 issue of Inter-Asia Cultural Studies. His latest article is forthcoming from positions: east Asian critique. His new project tracks the history of macrobiotics that gained cultural and political traction during the 1930s and the 1940s and the effects on design and lifestyle in contemporary Japan.
Email: kyoshida@ucmerced.edu
yehuda sharim
Professor Sharim makes films that highlight community-based collaboration to address sensitive social justice issues pertaining to immigrant and refugee representation, displacement, economic disparity, health, and the environmental crisis from the everyday perspectives of those who migrate to and from the United States.
Email: ysharim@ucmerced.edu
HISTORY
susan d. amussen
Professor Amussen is a historian of Britain and the Atlantic world in the 16th through 18th centuries, with a particular interest in gender, class, and race.
Email: samussen@ucmerced.edu
kevin dawson*
Professor Dawson's research interests include the History of the Atlantic World, Early American History, African Diaspora, and African American History.
Email: kdawson4@ucmerced.edu
sean malloy*
Professor Malloy researches U.S. diplomatic history, Nuclear history, War and morality, Twentieth century U.S. social movements.
Email: smalloy@ucmerced.edu
maria martin*
Professor Martin researches African Women and Gender, 20th Century Intellectual History of African Women, Inductive Development of Black Feminist Theory, African Nationalism, Transnational Black Experiences, and Africa in Classical Antiquity.
Email: mmartin360@ucmerced.edu
sholeh quinn
Professor Quinn specializes in the history of 16th and 17th century Iran, with a particular emphasis on historiography, or the tradition of chronicle writing during the Safavid dynasty.
Email: squinn@ucmerced.edu
david rouff*
Professor Rouff studies the intersection of people, policy, and place in the North American Southwest from the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries. His research draws together archival research, and spatial analysis to write social histories. His current project, “Emerging from the Rubble: Chinese in Merced, California,” harnesses local archives to spatially reconstruct and re-people the American Chinese community in Merced during the late nineteenth century and to explore how Chinese immigrants’ land use, gardens, and urban design facilitated the development of a vital transnational community.
Email: david.rouff@ucmerced.edu
muey saeteurn
Professor Saeteurn is an Associate Professor of African History, specializing in the history of decolonization, nation-building, socio-economic development, and agrarian change in twentieth-century Kenya and the world. The thread that runs through her research and the courses she teaches concerns the ways in which rural African women and men shaped large-scale historical processes while positioning themselves as central actors in the making of the modern globalized world. Her research has appeared in the Journal of African History, International Journal of African Historical Studies, and World History Connected. Her first book, Cultivating Their Own: Agriculture in Western Kenya During the “Development” Era, was published in 2020 with the Rochester Studies in African History and the Diaspora series at the University of Rochester Press. Her second book, Making Tea: Tea Farmers and the Production of Modern Kenya (forthcoming Spring 2027, Stanford University Press), foregrounds the importance of Africa and Africans in the history of tea, global food histories, and contemporary histories of capitalism by centering on the lived experiences of those individuals who cultivated, pruned, picked, and packaged leaves throughout late-colonial and independent Kenya.
Email: msaeturn3@ucmerced.edu
mario sifuentez*
Professor Sifuentez studies Immigration, Labor, Food, Sports, Hip-Hop, and Politics of the Third World.
Email: msifuentez@ucmerced.edu
sabrina smith*
Professor Smith studies Race, Gender, African Diaspora, Colonial Latin America, and Slavery.
Email: sesmith@ucmerced.edu
LITERATURES, LINGUISTICS, AND CULTURES IN THE SPANISH-SPEAKING WORLD
virginia adan-lifante
Professor Adan-Lifante studies Second language acquisition, Hispanic women's literature, Hispanic culture, and Puerto Rican literature and culture.
Email: vadan-lifante@ucmerced.edu
BRistin Scalzo Jones
Trained in Comparative Literature, Professor Scalzo Jones is interested in how creative texts can "translate" environmental research and ethics for various audiences and inspire positive action. Research interests: environmental communications, environmental humanities, environmental justice, animal studies, eco- and intersectional feminisms, modern Latin American and Italian literature, anti-racist and anti-bias pedagogy.
Email: bjones34@ucmerced.edu
ignacio lopez-calvo*
Professor López-Calvo's research focuses, for the most part, on two separate, albeit inter-related, issues: 1) cultural production by and about Latin American authors of Asian descent; and 2) the literary and cultural representations of the relationship between human rights, racialization, gender, migration, and authoritarianism.
Email: ilopez-calvo@ucmerced.edu
dalia magana*
Professor Magaña's interests include Sociolinguistics (Spanish Varieties in the U.S., Code-switching, Language Attitudes and Ideologies), Medical Discourse (Spanish in Healthcare, Intercultural Communication), Discourse Analysis (Systemic Functional Linguistics, Appraisal Theory), Heritage and Second Language Acquisition (Academic Writing Development), and Technology as a Teaching Tool.
Email: dmagana6@ucmerced.edu
manuel martin-rodriguez
Professor Martín-Rodriguez studies Chicano/a and Latino/a literature, Film studies, Literary theory, and Children's literature.
Email: mmartin-rodriguez@ucmerced.edu
CRISTIaN ricci
Professor Ricci’s research focuses on modern and contemporary Spanish literature, Maghrebi literature written in Spanish and Catalan, border and migration studies, and literary and cultural relations between North Africa and Spain. His work examines questions of identity, belonging, colonial and postcolonial memory, migration, and diaspora, with particular attention to Moroccan, Sahrawi, and Sephardic cultural production. He is especially interested in how literature represents cultural contact, displacement, multilingualism, and identity negotiation across the Mediterranean and other border spaces. His research draws on comparative and transnational approaches to Iberian and North African literary and cultural studies.
Email: cricci@ucmerced.edu
WRITING STUDIES
Eileen Camfield
Professor Camfield studies pedagogy and the role of writing to support academic identity development. She also focuses on the effects of learning relationships to foster student resilience, self-efficacy, and persistence.
Email: ecamfield@ucmerced.edu
Paul gibbons
Professor Gibbons' research includes Creative Writing Pedagogy, Hybrid Writing, Improvisation and Writing, Poetry, Multilingual Writing and translingualism.
Email: pgibbons@ucmerced.edu
Estee Beck
Professor Beck researches digital rhetoric, examining how surveillance, privacy, algorithms, and data practices shape writing, identity, and literacy online. Her work spans rhetoric and composition, computers and writing, rhetorical code studies, and writing program administration.
Email: ebeck2@ucmerced.edu
Yiran xu
Professor Xu is an Assistant Professor of Writing Studies. Research interests include multilingual writing development and assessment, second language acquisition and bilingualism, and systemic functional linguistics. Professor Xu works with multilingual learners and language instructors in different educational contexts to promote learner agency and equitable assessment.
Email: yxu72@ucmerced.edu
anne zanzucchi
Professor Zansuchhi's research interests include Writing Program Administration, Pedagogy & Assessment, Science and Technical Writing.
Email: azanzucchi@ucmerced.edu
Emily Johnston
Professor Johnston researches writing as a cognitive practice that fosters resilience. Her work spans both academic and public contexts, examining the social, intellectual, and embodied dimensions of writing. She developed the graduate seminar in public writing in Interdisciplinary Humanities.
Email: emilyjohnston@ucmerced.edu
*CRES associated faculty
**CRES affiliated faculty
Contact
Ma Vang
Interdisciplinary Humanities Graduate Program Chair
Email: mvang53@ucmerced.edu
Website: ih.ucmerced.edu