Faculty

Leti Volpp

Robert D. and Leslie Kay Raven Professor of Law in Access to Justice
UC Berkeley School of Law
Volpp 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" in Constitutional Commentary (2019); “Refugees Welcome?” in Berkeley La Raza Law Journal (2018); “...

Loïc Wacquant

Professor
Sociology

Wacquant is a professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is affiliated with the Center for the Study of Law and Society, the Global Metropolitan Studies Program, the Institute of Governmental Studies, the Center for Race and Gender, the Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory and the Center for Ethnographic Research. He is also a research associate at the Centre européen de sociologie et de science politique in Paris.

Born and raised in Southern France, Wacquant was educated in Montpellier, Paris, Chapel Hill and Chicago, where he received his Ph.D. in...

Rhiannon Noel Welch

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

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, in Italian...

Nathaniel Wolfson

Assistant Professor
Spanish and Portuguese

Wolfson is an assistant professor of Spanish and Portuguese and affiliated faculty of the Program in Critical Theory. He teaches primarily Brazilian literature and visual culture. His work engages media theory, language philosophy and the history of art.

He is currently finishing a book manuscript called Life of the Sign: Literature, Design and the Cybernetic Imaginary in Brazil. This project explores the crossings of experimental writing, design and critical technological thought in Brazil from the 1940s through the 1970s. Through a framework focusing on exchanges between...

Liesl Yamaguchi

Assistant Professor
French

Liesl Yamaguchi is Assistant Professor in the Department of French, specializing in 19th-century French literature, poetics, linguistics, literary theory, and translation.

Her first book On the Colors of Vowels: Thinking Through Synesthesia is forthcoming in the Verbal Arts Series of Fordham University Press. It asks why poets and scientists of the nineteenth century began imputing colors and brightnesses to vowels and studies how these discourses were valorized and invalidated as synesthesia came to be constituted as a legitimate object of modern science....

Damon Young

Associate Professor
French
Film & Media Studies

Young is co-appointed with the Department of French and is affiliated with the Program in Critical Theory, the Berkeley Center for New Media, the Institute for European Studies and the Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender & Sexuality. He teaches courses on art cinema, sexuality and media and topics in digital media and film theory (including classical film theory, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, semiotics, feminist and queer theory). His first book, Making Sex Public and Other Cinematic Fantasies,was published in the Theory Q series at Duke University Press in 2018...

Alexei Yurchak

Professor
Anthropology

Yurchak received his Ph.D. in cultural and linguistic anthropology from Duke University in 1997 (after having received a graduate degree in physics from Russia). His interests and areas of expertise include Soviet history and the processes of post-socialist transformation in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe; political institutions and ideologies in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia; political philosophy and language philosophy; the interface between language/discourse and power; comparative studies of communism and capitalism anthropology of media; visual anthropology; experimental...

Nasser Zakariya

Associate Professor
Rhetoric

Zakariya is an associate professor in the Department of Rhetoric at UC Berkeley. His research interests concern science and narrative, as well as varied topics in the history and philosophy of science. His book, A Final Story: Science, Myth and Beginnings, centers on the emergence of the so-called “scientific epic” as one among a set of possible frames or genres for synthesizing branches of knowledge according to a narrative, historical structure.

He has also been involved in interrelated collaborative research, including studies of the genealogy and structure of...

Hannah Zeavin

Assistant Professor
History

Hannah Zeavin is a scholar, writer, and editor whose work centers on the history of human sciences (psychoanalysis, psychology, and psychiatry), the history of technology and media, feminist science and technology studies, and media theory. Zeavin is an Assistant Professor of the History of Science and New Media in the Department of History and The Berkeley Center for New Media at UC Berkeley.