College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences
Colleagues,
I take this opportunity to communicate the appointments, reappointments, and extensions of several CHASS department chairs and directors that took effect earlier this year. I also offer heartfelt thanks to our outgoing unit heads for their dedication to our academic mission, teaching, research, and service.
The leadership appointments below have been reviewed and approved by UCR’s Academic Personnel Office and shared with Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor Elizabeth Watkins.
Please visit our main college website for a list of all CHASS department chairs and center directors.
Please join me in thanking our chairs and directors for their continued leadership.
Yours sincerely,
Daryle Williams
Professor of History and Dean
College of the Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences
University of California, Riverside
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Christina Torres |
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Anna Betbeze Anna Betbeze is an artist based in Los Angeles, where she lives and works. She has held solo exhibitions at venues including MassMOCA, Utah MOCA, The Atlanta Contemporary, The University of the Arts in Philadelphia, Markus Lüttgen in Cologne, Lüttgenmeijer in Berlin, Luxembourg & Dayan in London, Kate Werble Gallery in New York, and Francois Ghebaly in Los Angeles. Her work has been exhibited at institutions such as MOMA PS1, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, The Hessel Museum at Bard College, and The Power Station in Shanghai and reviewed in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Artforum, New York Magazine, Frieze, and The Los Angeles Times. She was awarded the Rome Prize in 2013–2014, received the Headlands Chiaro Award in 2020, and is a 2024 Guggenheim Fellow. |
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Department of Black Study
Anthony Jerry Anthony Russell Jerry holds a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. His primary research interests are in theorizing the relationships between race and citizenship and investigating the influence that regional discourses of race and racism have on citizenship practices and overall access to citizenship. He is the recipient of a Fulbright Garcia Robles Fellowship, a Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellowship, and a University of California Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellowship. He has worked in the Costa Chica Region of Mexico for over 10 years. His work also explores the impacts of issues of migration, immigration, racism, and citizenship on first-generation youth and youth of color in the U.S./Mexico border region. |
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Department of Ethnic Studies
Robert Perez Dr. Robert C. Perez is an associate professor in the Department of Ethnic Studies. He received his Ph.D. in history at UC Riverside. He focuses on American Indian History in California, the U.S. Southwest, Texas, and Northern Mexico. His research includes archival documents from the 16th to 20th centuries in Spanish, French, and English, and “attempts to present history with Native people at the center.” He is interested in studying how modern nations (policies) are associated with those of the settler-colonial past (dating back to 500 years). His current work is a book titled (tentatively) "The Incomplete Conquest of Sonora: Native Survival and Colonialism, 1610-1776.” |
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Gluck Fellows Program of the Arts Liz Przybylski As an interdisciplinary scholar of popular music, Liz Przybylski (proununciation) specializes in hip hop practices in Canada and the United States, as well as gender in the music industry. A graduate of Bard College (B.A.) and Northwestern University (M.A., Ph.D.), Przybylski’s research appears in Ethnomusicology, Journal of Borderlands Studies, and IASPM Journal, among others. Przybylski has presented research nationally and internationally, including at the Society for Ethnomusicology, Native American and Indigenous Studies Association, Feminist Theory and Music, International Association for the Study of Popular Music, and International Council for Traditional Music World Conferences. Recent publications analyze how the sampling of heritage music in Indigenous hip hop contributes to dialogues about cultural change in urban areas. Przybylski has also published on popular music pedagogy. Przybylski was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Faculty Fellowship and a Fulbright Fellowship. Przybylski's most recent book, Sonic Sovereignty: Hip Hop Indigeneity, and Shifting Popular Music Mainstreams (NYU Press, 2023) considers how contemporary Indigenous musicians champion self-determination through musical expression, and first book, Hybrid Ethnography: Online, Offline, and In Between (SAGE Publications, 2020) develops an innovative model hybrid on- and off-line ethnography for the analysis of expressive culture. In addition to university teaching, Przybylski has taught adult and pre-college learners at the American Indian Center in Chicago and the Concordia Language Villages program of Concordia College in Bemidji. On the radio, Przybylski hosted the world music show “Continental Drift” on WNUR in Chicago and has conducted interviews with musicians for programs including “At The Edge of Canada: Indigenous Research” on CJUM in Winnipeg. Przybylski served as the Media Reviews Editor for the journal American Music, as the President of the Society for Ethnomusicology, Southern California and Hawaii Chapter, and on the Society for Ethnomusicology Council. |
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Department of Gender and Sexuality Studies Crystal Baik Professor Crystal Mun-hye Baik (she/her) is an interdisciplinary feminist scholar with training in critical ethnic studies, visual culture studies, and oral history. She is the author of two books, including the forthcoming book, "Before the Fire Dogs Steal the Sun: An Elegy" (Duke University Press, 2026) and is the co-founder and co-editor of the Critical Militarization Studies Book Series with the University of Michigan Press. Baik is a recent recipient of the ACLS Digital Justice Seed Grant and a UCHRI Multicampus Research Award, and is also a Mellon New Directions Fellow (25-28). |
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David Biggs |
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Department of Theatre, Film, and Digital Production Robin Russin Robin Uriel Russin is a professor of dramatic writing at UC Riverside, where he has served as graduate advisor and as director of the MFA in Creative Writing and Writing for the Performing Arts. Russin has degrees from Harvard, Oxford, the Rhode Island School of Design, and UCLA. He is a Rhodes Scholar and a member of Phi Beta Kappa and the Writers Guild of America. Russin has written, produced, and directed for film, TV, and the theater, including Warner Bros.’ On Deadly Ground; America’s Most Wanted on Fox; and Vital Signs on ABC. His original one-hour series about King David, Beloved, was adapted by ABC as Of Kings and Prophets. He directed the independent feature film, When I Sing, co-starring Chris Mulkey, and an independent feature about the humor and challenges of disability, The Anxiety of Laughing. Another feature he co-wrote, 2 Hearts, starring Jacob Elordi and Radha Mitchell, had a wide theatrical release in 2020 and streams on Netflix. He is currently working on "The Rescuers: The Mystery of Goodness," a documentary series about the “Righteous Among the Nations,” the diplomats recognized by Yad Vashem in Israel for saving Jewish lives during the Holocaust. Robin has won or been a finalist for numerous awards for screenwriting and directing. In theatre, his play, Painted Eggs, was reviewed by The Los Angeles Times as "ambitious, heartfelt and hypnotic," and his play, The Face in the Reeds, had an extended four-month run at the Ruskin Group Theatre in LA. He has also written dozens of short plays and directed numerous stage productions. Russin is co-author with William Missouri Downs of the books Naked Playwriting and Screenplay: Writing the Picture, both in their second editions. |
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Social Sciences Laboratory Jennifer Merolla Jennifer Merolla is Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Riverside. Her research focuses on how the political environment shapes individual attitudes and behavior across many domains, such as candidate evaluations during elections, immigration policy attitudes, foreign policy attitudes, and support for democratic values and institutions. She is co-author of Democracy at Risk: How Terrorist Threats Affect the Public, published by the University of Chicago Press (2009), and Framing Immigrants: News Coverage, Public Opinion and Policy, published by the Russell Sage Foundation (2016). Her work has also appeared in journals such as Comparative Political Studies, Electoral Studies, the Journal of Politics, Perspectives on Politics, Political Behavior, Political Research Quarterly, Political Psychology,and Women, Politics, and Policy. Merolla has received support for her research on public opinion and terrorism from the National Science Foundation and Time Sharing Experiments in the Social Sciences. She was field editor for American Political Behavior for the Journal of Politics from 2015-2018. Merolla earned her Ph.D. in political science from Duke University. |
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Department of Sociology Rob Clark is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Riverside. He received his Ph.D. in sociology from Indiana University in 2007. Before moving to California in 2020, he was at the University of Oklahoma. Clark’s research agenda focuses on international development, the distribution of income in the world economy, and the global spread of institutions across the world polity. He is particularly interested in the effect of globalization (trade, foreign investment, international organizations) on economic growth, the evolution of income disparities as they exist within and between countries, and cross-national convergence in welfare outcomes, institutional forms, and cultural scripts. Collectively, his prior and current work addresses questions of political economy and social change at the global level. Clark’s research has appeared in International Sociology, Social Forces, Social Problems, Social Science and Medicine, Social Science Research, and elsewhere. |
| Reappointments | |
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Department of Comparative Literature & Languages Jeffrey Sacks Jeffrey Sacks works, teaches, and writes on poetics, critical theory, and Arabic Studies. Sacks is also interested in a number of overlapping questions in relation to collective socialities, law, philology, translation, the question of Palestine, Arabic philosophy, Jewish thought, decolonization in global frames, and practices of study. Sacks has authored two academic books: Poeticality: In Refusal of Settler Life (Fordham UP, forthcoming, 2025), and Iterations of Loss: Mutilation and Aesthetic Form al-Shidyaq to Darwish (Fordham UP, 2015), which was awarded the Harry Levin Prize of the American Comparative Literature Association (2016). In 2023, Sacks edited a special issue of the journal Critical Times: Interventions in Global Critical Theory around the theme “Critique and Translation.” Sacks is presently completing a book titled "Pomegranate Colloquy: Notes on Palestine and Decolonization," and is working, in longer time frames, on two books: one about law and the other about Marx. |
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Liberal Studies
Heidi Brayman |
| Liberal Studies
Stephen James |
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