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Jeffrey Allen
Associate Professor of Teaching
Department of Economics
Jeff, a native of the Inland Empire, obtained his undergraduate degree in economics from the University of California, Riverside in 2005. Subsequently, he pursued a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Oregon, graduating in 2014. Prior to joining UCR this fall, Jeff held positions at Bentley University and Pepperdine University. His research interests encompass economic growth and development, as well as macroeconomic theory.
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Jaye Austin Williams
Associate Professor
(she/her)
Department of Black Study
Jaye Austin Williams earned a Ph.D. from the joint program in drama and theatre at University of California, Irvine, and University of California, San Diego, with an emphasis in critical theory, and an M.F.A. in dramatic writing from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. Her shift to higher education followed a 30-year career in the professional theatre as an acclaimed director, playwright, actor, and consultant. She comes to University of California, Riverside, from Bucknell University, where she served as associate professor and chair of the Department of Critical Black Studies, and as a faculty affiliate in the Department of Theatre and Dance. Williams’ research and applied practice theorize the intricate ways in which theatre, drama, and cinema articulate Blackness as what Frantz Fanon called “a stimulus to anxiety,” which is cohered within the collective unconscious and performed in civil/social spheres globally.
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Fiona Connor
Assistant Professor
(she/her)
Department of Art
Fiona Connor (Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland) studied at University of Auckland’s Elam School of Fine Arts (B.F.A. 2004), University of California, San Diego (B.A. majoring in history 2008) and California Institute of the Arts (M.F.A. 2011). Vital, recurring concerns in her practice include the social and psychological life of the object, the politics of camouflage and mimesis, and the ethics and aesthetics of the built environment.
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Diego Esparza
Associate Professor of Teaching
(he/him)
Department of Political Science
Diego Esparza previously served as an associate professor of political science at the University of North Texas. He began his academic career as an assistant professor at the Naval Postgraduate School. His research examines policing, public security reform, and civil–military relations in Latin America. His work has been published in Comparative Political Studies, Journal of Politics in Latin America, Social Science Quarterly, Democracy and Security, and Defense and Security Analysis. He is also the author of Policing and Politics in Latin America: When Law Enforcement Breaks the Law (Lynne Rienner). Esparza is regularly invited to present for the Department of the Navy, the Center for Civil–Military Relations, and the Center for Homeland Defense Studies, speaking on intelligence, civil–military relations, national security, and Latin American politics. |
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Cristina Gomez-Vidal
Assistant Professor
(she, her, hers)
Department of Society, Environment and Health Equity
Cristina Gomez-Vidal is an interdisciplinary scholar whose work bridges health, place, and governance. Her research examines how government structures, policies, and processes shape health disparities, political agency, and community vulnerability to environmental and climate-related threats in unincorporated territories nationwide. She has a particular focus on unincorporated communities that have limited political representation and are often overlooked in political and media discourse. Through her research, teaching, and applied work, she aims to strengthen procedural justice and promote community-centered policy solutions.
Previously, Cristina was a Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California, Merced, in the School of Social Sciences, Humanities, and Arts’ Public Health Department. She earned her Ph.D. and M.S.W. from the UC Berkeley School of Social Work and is a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health Policy Research Scholar alum. Beyond academia, she brings extensive practice experience in community health engagement, advocacy, and training.
Gomez-Vidal joined the University of California, Riverside, faculty in January 2025.
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Brian Haas
Assistant Professor of Teaching
(he, him, his)
Department of Philosophy
Brian Haas received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Southern California (2025) and his B.A. in philosophy from Reed College (2017). His primary research project is on deception and other manipulative influences, working at the intersection of ethics, social philosophy, and the philosophy of law. In addition, he has projects in the philosophy of language and metaphysics. Ultimately, Haas's research aims to provide a better understanding of how we influence one another both for the better and for the worse.
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Stephanie Jones
Assistant Professor
(she, her, hers)
Department of Black Study
Stephanie Jones' research tackles housing inequality as an antiblack initiative in Oakland, critically analyzing the racial of housing and how Blackness is constructed within this framework. By theorizing dispossession through Black geographies, she provides profound insights into the spatial experiences of Black individuals. Jones constructs a robust framework for geographies that addresses displacement while pioneering a scholarly approach to understanding the historical antiblack projects influencing today's housing crises.
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DaEun Jung
Assistant Professor
(she, her, her)
Department of Dance
DaEun Jung is a Korean-born, Los Angeles–based movement artist, researcher, and educator whose work interlaces forms, principles, and methods of both ancestral and contemporary performance practices. Her pedagogical research encompasses the practice and repertoire of classical and folk Korean dance, as well as dance composition, movement improvisation, and somatic practices.
After six years of early conservatory training at the National Gugak School, where she received the National Theater of Korea Award, Jung earned a B.A. in dance with a minor in Korean literature from Ewha Womans University and an M.F.A. in dance from the University of California, Los Angeles.
Jung’s choreographic work has been supported by arts organizations and residency programs, including Jacob’s Pillow, New England Foundation for the Arts, Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Korea Foundation, New Music USA, Headlands Center for the Arts, Loghaven, Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography, and Ucross.
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Na Yeon Kim
Assistant Professor
(she, her)
Department of Psychology
Na Yeon Kim received her Ph.D. in cognitive psychology and neuroscience from Princeton University in 2021 and her B.A. in cognitive science from Yale University in 2013. Before joining the University of California, Riverside, she was a postdoctoral research associate at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). Kim’s research examines how people vary in the way they perceive the world and pay attention, with a focus on how these processes differ in autism spectrum disorder and related clinical conditions. Her lab employs behavioral, eye-tracking, and neuroimaging methods to investigate how basic cognitive capacities, such as sensory processing and attention, support higher-order cognition, including complex social behavior. She is also passionate about leveraging accessible technologies (e.g., smartphones and webcams) to reduce disparities in access to diagnosis, intervention, and research opportunities.
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Erin Lam
Assistant Professor
(they, them)
Department of Comparative Literature and Languages
Erin Lam teaches courses on love and desire in ancient Greco-Roman and contemporary American poetry, framed through queer and feminist studies. They specialize in contemporary American queer of color poetry and art, Latin love elegy, and Greek tragedy. Their research engages in a creative practice of reimagining societal structures, relationality, temporality, and inheritance. Their current book project, "A Hermeneutics of Irreverence: Queer of Color Poets Playing with the 'Classical Tradition,' ” theorizes irreverence as a methodology by which contemporary American queer of color artists and writers expand the creative possibilities of interacting with the Greco-Roman literary tradition. Lam received their Ph.D. in classics at University of California, Berkeley, and has held the UC President’s and Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at University of California, Santa Barbara, the Consortium for Faculty Diversity Pre-/Post-doctoral Fellowship at Bryn Mawr College, and the Pearson Fellowship for study at Cambridge University.
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Samuel Lamontagne
Assistant Professor
Department of Music
Samuel Lamontagne previously held a UC Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellowship in the University of California, Los Angeles, Department of History after completing his Ph.D. in ethnomusicology at UCLA. His forthcoming book examines Black Los Angeles music histories through the lens of hip hop’s creative practices and critical knowledges. Lamontagne’s broader research explores Black music histories and their entanglements with Pan-African solidarities, decolonization, and cultural politics. His work interrogates how Black musical practices generate alternative archives, theories, and political imaginaries that unsettle dominant narratives in music scholarship. At UC Riverside, he continues to develop projects at the intersections of ethnomusicology, Black studies, and popular music studies, with a commitment to centering Black intellectual and cultural production.
Lamontagne joined the University of California, Riverside, faculty in January 2025.
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Angela Ke Li
Assistant Professor
(she, her, hers)
Department of Media and Cultural Studies
Angela Ke Li is a scholar of digital technology and media industries, specializing in China’s digital economies and innovation cultures. She is completing her first book, which examines corporate–state relations in China’s ride-hailing industry as co-constituted with technofetishism. Her second book project investigates the techno-politics of labor expendability amid the rise of AI. Before joining University of California, Riverside, she was an assistant professor at the National University of Singapore. She also held visiting fellowships at Princeton University (2023–24) and the Australian National University (Spring 2025). Her work has appeared in journals including New Media & Society, Information, Communication & Society, International Journal of Communication, Journalism, Journalism Studies and Science, Technology & Human Values (forthcoming), among others. She received her Ph.D. in media studies from the University of Illinois, Urbana–Champaign, an M.Phil. in communication from Hong Kong Baptist University, and a B.A. in history from Peking University.
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Colleen O'Briant
Assistant Professor of Teaching
(she, her)
Department of Economics
Colleen O’Briant is an applied econometrician using econometric and machine learning methods to study decision-making under uncertainty. She develops simulations to compare the strengths and weaknesses of assumptions in each tradition and applies this work to analyze how taxi drivers decide where to seek passengers. More broadly, she is interested in combining insights from econometrics and machine learning to more powerfully and accurately model economic behavior.
Previously, O’Briant was a visiting assistant professor at the University of Arkansas and earned her Ph.D. in economics at the University of Oregon. At University of California, Riverside, she teaches machine learning, data analytics, economics for engineers, and intermediate microeconomics, using a flipped classroom and interactive programming koans that help students quickly build confidence in data-driven analysis.
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Holly O'Rourke
Associate Professor
(she, her)
Department of Psychology
Holly O’Rourke is a quantitative psychologist focusing on the intersection of quantitative methodology and the social sciences by developing and assessing statistical models that are utilized to answer real-world questions and address analytic issues in psychology. Recent work examines how to incorporate ideographic approaches such as the Group Iterative Multiple Model Estimation (GIMME) method with machine learning techniques to create individualized profiles of biobehavioral and health traits that can serve as predictors in a wide variety of behavioral theories; longitudinal mediation models with nonlinear effects; mediation for zero-inflated count outcomes; and specifying conditional indirect effects in latent change score models.
Prior to coming to University of California, Riverside, Holly was an assistant professor at Arizona State University and a core scientist as part of ASU’s collaboration with the Phoenix Bioscience Core.
O’Rourke joined the UCR faculty in January 2025.
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Bernardette Pinetta
Assistant Professor
(she, her, ella)
Department of Psychology
Bernardette Pinetta is the daughter of Guatemalan and Mexican immigrants. Growing up in Los Angeles, she witnessed how inequitable our educational system is towards communities of color and the need for culturally relevant and social justice-oriented education. As an interdisciplinary scholar, she weaves together theories from education, psychology, and political science to contextualize how youth of color develop their ethnic-racial identity and how such views serve as key mechanisms for their orientation toward social justice. She partners with schools, organizations, and young people to cultivate learning environments that are both culturally affirming and consciousness-raising. Pinetta earned her doctorate from the Combined Program of Education and Psychology at the University of Michigan; and holds a B.A. in political science and a minor in education from University of California, Los Angeles. She is a former Ford Pre-Doctoral Fellow, Rackham Merit Fellow, and UCLA Chancellor’s HSI Postdoctoral Fellow. |
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Will Pruitt
Assistant Professor
(he, him, his)
Department of Ethnic Studies
Will Pruitt is a scholar of twentieth and twenty-first-century U.S. literature and culture with expertise in Black radicalisms, Black feminism, and Black queer studies. Through his research, writing, and teaching, he compares epistemologies of progress, regress, and stagnation towards racial equality and justice. Tentatively entitled “Presidential Blacknesses During the Jim Crow Era: A History of Hypotheticals,” his current book project narrates, explicates, and assesses a history of debates about the meaning and function of a Black U.S. President, debates that raged between the Compromise of 1877 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. |
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Deepa Ramamurthy
Assistant Professor
(she, her)
Department of Psychology
Deepa Ramamurthy is a systems neuroscientist investigating how past experiences shape perception and action. She earned her B.S. in biology from Notre Dame de Namur University and her Ph.D. in neuroscience from University of California, Davis, where she used the marsupial whisker system to examine how early vision loss alters tactile processing and drives compensatory plasticity across sensory systems. As a postdoctoral researcher at University of California, Berkeley, she developed quantitative methods to dissociate sensory, motor, and cognitive signals in neural activity during goal-directed behavior in mice. Building on this work, she studies how recent experiences guide attention during sensory processing, with the goal of uncovering the roles of distinct cell types and neural circuit motifs in attention and their dysfunction in neuropsychiatric disease models. Her research combines quantitative behavioral and computational modeling approaches with cell type–specific tools to reveal how brain representations are dynamically reshaped by experience to support flexible behavior.
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Ricardo Rocha
Assistant Professor
Department of Hispanic Studies
Ricardo Rocha is a theatre scholar and practitioner specializing in Latinx, Afro-Latinx, and Chicanx theatre and film, bilingual performance practices, 19th-century U.S. theatre, and Spanish Golden Age drama. With decades of acting (SAG/AFTRA/AEA) and directing experience, he has staged bilingual adaptations in multiple languages and performed widely. He is producing and performing in the forthcoming "Splendor and Death of Joaquín Murieta" by Pablo Neruda, which informs his book project, "Selling the Sensation," on Latinidad in early U.S. theatre. Recent publications include "La Rose" in "The Routledge Companion to Latine Theatre and Performance" (2024), the co-authored "Routledge Performance Practitioners volume on Luis Valdez" (2024), and essays in leading journals. A UCR Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow (’23-’25), he was recognized by the Mellon Foundation and the UC President’s Office for advancing humanities scholarship. He holds a Ph.D. in theatre and drama with an emphasis in Latin American studies from University of California, Irvine, and University of California, San Diego.
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Juan Manuel Rubio
Assistant Professor
(he, him)
Department of History
Juan Manuel Rubio is a scholar of capitalism, labor, and the environment. His work focuses primarily on the history of the mining industry and the struggles of those touched by its environmental legacy.
His book manuscript, tentatively titled "Veins of Conflict: The Transcorporeal Politics of Copper Mining in Central Peru," examines a series of environmental conflicts through the lens of the body and disability.
Rubio also researches the impact of the mining industry on disadvantaged communities today. Through community-based collaborations with public health scholars and environmental activists, he has conducted scientific research on the sources of lead contamination in Southern California. In the context of this community-academic partnership, he has produced several public media projects linking the issue of lead in the soil with histories of capitalism, corporate science, and environmental racism.
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Elena Sesma
Assistant Professor
(she, her)
Department of Anthropology
Elena Sesma is a historical archaeologist with a primary focus on sites of slavery and emancipation in North America. Her research blends ethnography and archaeology to understand the ways that living communities relate to and reinterpret historic spaces and materials today. In recent years, she developed a campus archaeology project at the University of Kentucky, documented historic cemeteries, and conducted collections-based research on a post-emancipation homesite in Appalachia. Her current book project explores archaeological ethnography of landscape and belonging around a 19th-century plantation in the Bahamas.
Sesma earned her M.A. and Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and holds B.A. degrees in anthropology and women's studies from University of Maryland. Prior to joining the University of California, Riverside, Sesma was an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Kentucky (2020-2025) and a President’s Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley (2019-2020).
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Andrea Silva
Associate Professor of Teaching
(she, her)
Department of Political Science
Andrea Silva is a political scientist whose research centers on immigration, federalism, and racial and ethnic politics in the United States. She studies how state institutions and policy tools shape immigrant incorporation, trust in government, and local food environments for immigrants and communities of color. Her projects employ mixed methods, including survey analysis, archival data, interviews, and GIS. Silva is a co-author of The Presidency and Immigration Policy: Rhetoric and Reality (Routledge, 2018) and has a forthcoming book, "Direct Democracy Rules: How Initiatives and Referendums Affect State Immigration Policy" (NYU Press). She also collaborates on research exploring how state policy affects food insecurity and immigrant food business entrepreneurship.
Previously, Silva was on the faculty at the University of North Texas and associate director of the Latino and Mexican American Studies Program. She earned her Ph.D. in political science from University of California, Riverside. Silva rejoined the UCR faculty in 2025.
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Todd Sorensen
Professor of Teaching
(he, him)
Department of Economics
Todd Sorensen is a labor economist who is rejoining University of California, Riverside, after 11 years, now in a more teaching-focused role. He greatly values the perspectives of UC students and feels honored to teach these top 9% of students in California. His research examines monopsonistic labor markets, where firms set wages and the usual predictions about minimum wages or unions break down.
Todd grew up in Seattle, and studied for his bachelor’s in economics and mathematics at Western Washington University (1998-2002). He earned his Ph.D. in economics at the University of Arizona (2002–2007). He taught for the last three years at University of California, Merced, following seven years at the University of Nevada, Reno, after starting his career at UCR. Todd and his spouse have held titles at every UC campus not starting with the letter “S.”
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Christina Torres
Professor and Chair
(she, her, ella)
Department of Anthropology
Christina Torres is a bioarchaeologist who received her Ph.D in anthropology from University of California, Santa Barbara, and was previously a professor at University of California, Merced. Torres’ primary research questions focus on the body and its intersection with society and culture. Through her research, she seeks to convey the ways that our physical body is so much more than our biology. To do so, she studies the ways that humans directly intervene with their bodies through body modifications and patterns of violence and the potentially substantial and indelible marks these leave on the skeleton. Within the frameworks of mobility and inequality, she studies the way in which the body maintains evidence of the customs of populations in different social spheres and environments. In this way, her work seeks to understand the experience of living in the Atacama in archaeological times and the ways that this life is made manifest in the body.
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Han Wang
Assistant Professor
Department of Economics
Han Wang studies microeconomic theory, with research interests in information economics and mechanism design. His research explores how contracts can be designed to incentivize researchers to conduct costly experiments. He received his Ph.D. in economics from The Ohio State University and an M.S. in economics from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
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Bohan Ye
Assistant Professor of Teaching
(she, her, hers)
Department of Economics
Bohan Ye's teaching and research center on microeconomic theory, game theory, and experimental economics, with a particular focus on trust dynamics, emotional responses in communication, and decision-making behavior.
She earned her bachelor’s degree in finance and master’s degree in management science from Tsinghua University in Beijing, a research master’s degree in economics from Tilburg University in the Netherlands, and a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Arizona.
Before coming to University of California, Riverside, Dr. Ye served as an assistant professor of economics at the University of Southern Indiana, where she received the H. Lee Cooper Core Curriculum Teaching Award, the University Outstanding Teaching Award, and the Dean’s Award for Excellence in Teaching.
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