Faculty Advisory Committee

Jovan Lewis

Professor of Human Geography; Founder/Director
Department of Geography
Berkeley Black Geographies Project

Jovan Scott Lewis is Professor and Chair of the Department of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley. He co-leads the Economic Disparities research cluster in Berkeley’s Othering and Belonging Institute. He received his PhD in anthropology from the London School of Economics. Jovan’s research is concerned with the articulations of racialized poverty, which he examines through questions of racial capitalism, underdevelopment, and radical terms of repair. He has conducted research in Jamaica on these topics, which culminated in his monograph, Scammer’s Yard: The Crime of Black...

Cecilia Mo

Associate Professor of Political Science
Charles and Louise Travers Department of Political Science

Cecilia Hyunjung Mo is an associate professor of Political Science at University of California, Berkeley. She is also an associate professor of public policy (by courtesy) at UC Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy. She specializes in behavioral political economy, comparative political behavior, the political economy of development, and social policy research. She focuses on significant contemporary challenges to development and moral issues of today like cultivating democratic citizenship, understanding and addressing the negative consequences of rising inequality, combatting modern...

Rachel Morello-Frosch

Professor of Environmental Health Sciences and Community Health Sciences
Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management

Rachel Morello-Frosch is a Professor in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management and the School of Public Health at UC Berkeley. For over 20 years, her research has examined social determinants of environmental health among diverse communities with a focus on inequality, psychosocial stress and how these factors interact with environmental chemical exposures to produce health inequalities. Much of her work has examined this environmental justice question in the context of climate change, ambient air pollution, exposures to environmental chemicals and effects on...

Christian Paiz

Associate Professor of Comparative Ethnic Studies
Department of Ethnic Studies

Broadly speaking, I am a twentieth-century U.S. labor historian with interests in transnational migration, social movements, and history methods. In my first book, titled The Strikers of Coachella: A Rank-and-File History of the UFW Movement (UNC Press, 2023), I studied how farmworkers in Southern California’s Coachella Valley (men, women, migrants, residents, Filipino and Mexican) envisioned their...

Laura E. Pérez

Professor of Chicano/Latino Studies, Chair
Latinx Research Center

Laura E. Pérez is Chair of the new interdisciplinary and transAmericas research hub, the Latinx Research Center, formerly the Center for Latino Policy Research. She is author of Chicana Art: The Politics of Spiritual and Aesthetic Altarities (Duke University Press, 2007) in which she theorized decolonial aesthetics and decolonial spiritualities while achiving the work of more than forty Chicana visual, literary, and performance artists from the early 1970s through the early 2000s. She curated UC Berkeley’s first and only US Latina/o Performance Art series in 2001-02; co-curated, with...

Paul Pierson

John Gross Professor of Political Science
Charles and Louise Travers Department of Political Science

Paul Pierson is the John Gross Professor of Political Science at the University of California at Berkeley. Pierson’s teaching and research includes the fields of American politics and public policy, comparative political economy, and social theory. His most recent books are Off-Center: The Republican Revolution and the Erosion of American Democracy (with Jacob Hacker), Politics in Time: History, Institutions and Social Analysis, The Transformation of American Politics: Activist Government and the Rise of Conservatism (co-edited with Theda Skocpol), and Winner...

Jesse Rothstein

Professor of Public Policy and Economics
Department of Economics
Institute for Research on Labor and Employment (IRLE)

Jesse Rothstein is a professor of public policy and economics. He joined the Berkeley faculty in 2009. He spent the 2009-10 academic year in public service, first as Senior Economist at the U.S. Council of Economic Advisers and then as Chief Economist at the U.S. Department of Labor. Earlier, he was assistant professor of economics and public affairs at Princeton University. He received his Ph.D. in economics from UC Berkeley in 2003.

Janelle Scott

Robert C. and Mary Catherine Birgeneau Distinguished Chair in Educational Disparities
Graduate School of Education

Janelle Scott is a Professor at the University of California, Berkeley in the Graduate School of Education and African American Studies Department. She holds the Robert C. and Mary Catherine Birgeneau Distinguished Chair in Educational Disparities. Scott earned a Ph.D. in Education Policy from the University of California, Los Angeles Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, and a B.A. in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley. Prior to earning her doctorate, she taught elementary school in Oakland, Calif.

Her research explores the relationship...

Nicholas Vargas

Associate Professor of Chicanx/Latinx Studies
Department of Ethnic Studies

I am an Associate Professor of Chicanx/Latinx Studies in the Department Ethnic Studies. I am fortunate to co-lead the Latinxs and Democracy Cluster at UCB and serve as Faculty Co-Director of the UCB Latino Social Science Pipeline Initiative (LSSPI), both of which aim to advance Latinx social science scholarship and strengthen academic pipelines.

My research is situated primarily in the social sciences with foci on...

Leti Volpp

Robert D. and Leslie Kay Raven Professor of Law in Access to Justice
Berkeley Law School

Leti Volpp joined the Berkeley Law faculty in 2005. She researches immigration and citizenship law with a particular focus on how law is shaped by ideas about 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), “Passports in the Time of Trump” in Symploke (2018), “Feminist, Sexual, and Queer Citizenship” in the Oxford Handbook of Citizenship (2017), “Immigrants Outside the Law: President Obama,...