Faculty Advisory Committee

Gabriel Lenz

Professor
Charles and Louis Travers Department of Political Science

Gabriel Lenz is a professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley. He studies democratic accountability, focusing on how to help voters hold their politicians accountable and how governments can protect people from violence and incarceration. He has published a book on elections with the University of Chicago Press and has published articles in the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, and Journal of Politics, Political Analysis, and other journals.

Christian Paiz

Assistant Professor
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...

Paul Pierson

Professor of Chicano/Latino Studies, Chair
Charles and Louis 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...

Karen Chapple

Professor of City & Regional Planning, Carmel P. Friesen Chair
College of Environmental Design

Karen Chapple, Ph.D., is a Professor of City and Regional Planning at the University of California, Berkeley. Chapple specializes in housing, community and economic development, as well as regional planning. She has most recently published on job creation on industrial land (in Economic Development Quarterly) and accessory dwelling units as a smart growth policy (in the Journal of Urbanism). Her recent book (Routledge, September 2014) is entitled...

Irene Bloemraad

Professor of Sociology and Thomas Garden Barnes Chair of Canadian Studies
Department of Sociology

Irene Bloemraad is an associate professor of Sociology and the Thomas Garden Barnes Chair of Canadian Studies at Berkeley. Her research focuses on how immigrants become incorporated into political bodies and the consequences of their presence on politics and understandings of membership. She is the author of Becoming a Citizen: Incorporating Immigrants and Refugees in the United States and Canada, Civic Hopes and Political Realities: Immigrants, Community Organizations, and Political Engagement (with Karthick Ramakrishnan), and Rallying for Immigrant Rights (co-...

Sarah Anzia

Associate Professor of Political Science & Public Policy
Sarah Anzia studies American politics with a focus on state and local government, elections, interest groups, political parties, and public policy. Her book, Timing and Turnout: How Off-Cycle Elections Favor Organized Groups, examines how the timing of elections can be manipulated to affect both voter turnout and the composition of the electorate, which, in turn, affects election outcomes and public policy. She also studies the role of government employees and public-sector unions in elections and policymaking in the U.S. In addition, she has written about the politics of public pensions,...

Stephanie Zonszein

Assistant Professor of Political Science
Charles and Louis Travers Department of Political Science

I study the politics of immigration in advanced industrial societies, with a focus on the behavior of immigrants and native-born, the policies which aim to shape immigrant integration, and the reactions to those policies. One strand of my research considers what can be achieved by non-assimilationist policies — that is, policies that either remove structural barriers to integration without imposing cultural ones or that make specific accommodations for cultural diversity. These are some of the research questions that motivate this strand of work: Can immigrants enter mainstream...

Armando Lara-Millán

Associate Professor of Sociology
Department of Sociology

Armando Lara-Millán is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at UC Berkeley. He earned his PhD in Sociology from Northwestern University in 2013. Before joining the Department of Sociology, he was a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Postdoctoral Scholar in Health Policy Research at UC Berkeley. Armando is fascinated by how powerful organizations, whose actions affect the life fortunes of large numbers of people, use language to reshape critical material resources; that is, he examines how these organizations use culture and cognitive processes to recast the...

Daniel Cohen

Assistant Professor of Sociology
Department of Sociology

Daniel Aldana Cohen is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is Director of the Socio-Spatial Climate Collaborative, or (SC)2, and and serves as a member of the Graduate Group of the Designated Emphasis in Political Economy. He is also Founding Co-Director of the Climate and Community Project. He is a...