New Faculty 2019-20

Jean Beaman
Assistant Professor, Sociology | Ph.D., Northwestern University

Jean Beaman is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She was previously on the faculty at Purdue University and has held visiting fellowships at Duke University and the European University Institute (Florence, Italy). Her research is ethnographic in nature and focuses on race/ethnicity, racism, international migration, and state-sponsored violence in both France and the United States. She is author of Citizen Outsider: Children of North African Immigrants in France (University of California Press, 2017), as well as numerous articles and chapters. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology from Northwestern University. She is also an Editor of H-Net Black Europe, an Associate Editor of the journal, Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, and Corresponding Editor for the journal Metropolitics/Metropolitiques.

Charmaine Chua
Assistant Professor, Global Studies | Ph.D., University of Minnesota

Charmaine Chua is Assistant Professor in the Department of Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her current research interests are in the rise of just-in-time logistics as a political-economic force that shapes contemporary race, class and state-capital relations across the US-China supply chain. Chua received her Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Minnesota, with an emphasis on political theory and international relations. She is the Review and Open Site Editor for Environment and Planning D: Society and Space and a member of the Abolition collective.

Douglas J. Kennett
Professor, Anthropology | Ph.D., University of California, Santa Barbara

Douglas J. Kennett (B.A. [1990]; M. A. [1994]; Ph.D, [1998], University of California, Santa Barbara) Douglas J. Kennett is a Professor of Environmental Archaeology in the Department of Anthropology at University of California, Santa Barbara. He has held faculty positions at California State University Long Beach (1998-2001) and the University of Oregon (2001-2011) and Penn State (2011-2018). He is the author of The Island Chumash (University of California Press, 2005) and co-editor of the book Behavioral Ecology and the Transition to Agriculture (University of California Press, 2006). His current interests include the study of human sociopolitical dynamics under changing environmental conditions, human impacts on ancient environments, and behavioral response to abrupt climate change in the past.

Dan Lane
Assistant Professor, Communication | Ph.D., University of Michigan

Dan Lane is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at UC Santa Barbara. His research and teaching explore how individuals and groups use communication technology to create social and political change. Most recently, he has studied how political expression on social media can stimulate political engagement, improve intergroup relations, and reduce political inequality. These interests have their origins in Dan’s time as the founder of Good Eye Video, a digital storytelling company for non-profits. His research has been published in Journal of Communication, Communication Research, Information, Communication & Society, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, & Human Communication Research.

Anshu Malhotra
Assistant Professor, Global Studies | Ph.D., SOAS, University of London

Anshu Malhotra is Kundan Kaur Kapany Chair of Sikh and Punjab Studies. She has taught at the Department of History, University of Delhi. She holds a Ph.D from SOAS, University of London. She works on gender and histories of Punjab, Sikhs and South Asia, cultural studies, and autobiography studies. She is the author of Piro and the Gulabdasis: Gender, Sect and Society in Punjab (OUP, 2017) and Gender, Caste and Religious Identities: Restructuring Class in Colonial Punjab (OUP, 2002). She has co-edited Punjab Reconsidered: History, Culture and Practice (OUP, 2012); Speaking of the Self: Gender, Performance and Autobiography in South Asia (Duke University Press, 2015; Zubaan, 2017); and Text and Tradition in Early Modern North India (OUP, 2018).

Sameer Pandya
Assistant Professor, Asian American Studies | Ph.D., Stanford University

Sameer Pandya, Assistant Professor in the Department of Asian American Studies, is an interdisciplinary scholar and fiction writer who brings together cultural analysis and cultural production in his study of race, migration, and dislocation among South Asian Americans. He has published essays in the Journal of Asian American Studies, Amerasia, and South Asian Popular Culture and his first book The Blind Writer: Stories and a Novella was on the longlist for the PEN/Open Book Award. His research interests include cultural and literary studies, Asian American and postcolonial studies, and creative writing. He earned his BA from UC Davis and his PhD from Stanford University.

Satyajit Singh
Professor, Political Science and Global Studies | Ph.D., University of Delhi

Satyajit Singh is Professor in the Departments of Political Science and Global Studies. He has worked as Professor at the University of Delhi, as Dean at School of Development Studies and School of Human Ecology, at Ambedkar University of Delhi and in The World Bank. He is interested in Governance, Public Policy, Institutional Reforms, Indian Politics, Development and Environmental issues. His publications include The Local in Governance: Politics, Decentralization & Environment (OUP 2016); Taming the Waters: The Political Economy of Large Dams in India (OUP 1997); (co-ed) The Dam and the Nation: Displacement and Resettlement in the Narmada Valley (OUP, 1997); (co-ed) Decentralisation: Institutions and Politics in Rural India (OUP, 2007).

Terrell Winder
Assistant Professor, Sociology | Ph.D., University of California, Los Angeles

Terrell Winder is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. An urban ethnographer, Winder's research areas include race & ethnicity, sexuality & sexual health, qualitative research methods, and education. He is currently completing a book manuscript tentatively titled, Unspoiling Identity: How Black Gay Men Learn to Overcome Stigma. In this book, he examines stigma response processes among stigmatized populations negotiating more than one stigma simultaneously. Winder received his B.A. in Comparative Ethnic Studies from Columbia University and his Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California, Los Angeles.

New Faculty 2018-19

Youssef Benzarti
Assistant Professor, Economics | Ph.D., UC Berkeley

Youssef Benzarti is an Assistant Professor of Economics at UC Santa Barbara. He received his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley and works at the intersection of Public Finance and Behavioral Economics. His work quantifies the hassle costs of taxation, and studies the incidence of payroll taxes and Value Added Taxes. 

Five Things to Know About: Youssef Benzarti

Amy Gonzales
Assistant Professor, Communication | Ph.D., Cornell University

Amy Gonzales is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication. Her work examines the effects of social interaction via communication technologies on individual identity, social support, and well-being. She is also interested in the consequences of disrupted access to communication technology. She is especially interested in these phenomena for people from disadvantaged communities (e.g., racial/ethnic minorities, low-income populations, LGBTQ individuals, etc.). Her work aims to advance theoretical understanding and real-world solutions that may help mitigate the long-term consequences of new digital infrastructures that may otherwise exacerbate social inequalities.

Five Things to Know About: Amy Gonzales

Paasha Mahdavi
Assistant Professor, Political Science | Ph.D., UC Los Angeles

Paasha Mahdavi is an Assistant Professor of Political Science. His research explores statistical methodology to study energy and environmental politics. Recent work includes the politics of extractive resource nationalization; the effects of carbon dividends on civic engagement; the network dynamics of political elites; and the political economy of fossil fuel subsidy reform. His articles have been published in journals such as Energy Policy, Nature Energy, Political Science Research & Methods, and World Politics. He earned his B.A in Economics from Columbia University, M.A. in International Policy from Stanford University, and M.S. in Statistics and Ph.D. in Political Science from UCLA.

Five Things to Know About: Paasha Mahdavi

Catherine Taylor
Assistant Professor, Sociology | Ph.D., Cornell University

Cate Taylor is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Her main research and teaching areas are gender, work and occupations, social psychology, health, and methods. Before joining the faculty at UCSB, Professor Taylor earned her PhD in Sociology at Cornell University, was a Robert Wood Johnson Health & Society Scholar at Columbia University, and was a faculty member at Indiana University. Her work has been published in leading sociological and interdisciplinary journals including American Journal of Sociology, Social Science & Medicine, and Gender & Society. She also delivers training and talks to help organizations increase their diversity in hiring and retention.

Five Things to Know About: Catherin Taylor

Alisa Tazhitdinova
Assistant Professor, Economics | Ph.D., UC Berkeley

Alisa Tazhitdinova is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Economics. He primary interests are in economics of taxation and labor economics. Professor Tazhitdinova’s research combines economic theory and large administrative datasets to understand how tax systems affect individuals’ and firms’ behaviors, in order to help design more effective public policies. Professor Tazhitdinova’s research has been supported by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), and has been published in Journal of Public Economics. She received her Ph.D. from University of California, Berkeley in 2016.

Five Things to Know About: Alisa Tazhitdinova

Sharon Tettegah
Professor, Black Studies | Ph.D., UC Santa Barbara

Sharon Tettegahis the Director at the Center for Black Studies Research andProfessor in the Department of Black Studies. . Dr. Tettegah's research centers on the intersection of Social Science, STEM learning, Emotions, Equity and Social justice. She was also a former Program Director at the National Science Foundation where she managed five programs in the Directorates of Education and Human Resources, Computer and Information Science and Engineering and including a NSF cross-cutting program on Science, Engineering, Education for Sustainability (SEES). Dr. Tettegah is the Series Editor for Emotions and Technology: Communication of feeling, for, with and through digital media. She is also co-editor on 7 of the 8 volumes on Emotions, Technology.The volumes include Digital Games; Behaviors; Design and Learning; Design; Health; Learning; Social Media and Mobile Technology.

Hannah Wohl
Assistant Professor, Sociology | Ph.D., Northwestern University

Hannah Wohl is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology. Her research interests include art, culture, markets, valuation, gender, and sociological theory. She studies aesthetic judgment in various social settings, particularly creative industries. Her current book project is an ethnography of the New York City contemporary art world, which examines how artists produce and circulate distinctive creative visions. Hannah received her PhD in sociology from Northwestern University and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in sociology at Columbia University.

New Faculty 2017-18

Amy Boddy
Assistant Professor, Anthropology | Ph.D., Wayne State University School of Medicine

Amy M. Boddy is a human biologist and evolutionary theorist in the Department of Anthropology. Her work uses applications from evolution and ecology to understand human health and disease. She uses a combination of genomics, computational biology and evolutionary theory to understand life history trade-offs between survival and reproduction across different levels of biological organization. One component of her research program examines how environmental cues, such as high extrinsic mortality, may guide resource allocations to cancer defenses and reproduction. Current cancer research topics include comparative oncology, intragenomic conflict, cellular life history trade-offs, and early life adversity and cancer outcomes later in life. In addition to her cancer research, she studies maternal/fetal conflict theory and the consequences of fetal microchimeric cells in maternal health and disease.

Tristan Bridges
Assistant Professor, Sociology | Ph.D., University of Virginia

Tristan Bridges is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology. He is a scholar of gender and sexualities whose work focuses on the construction of masculine identities, especially hybrid masculinities, and analyzes the relationship between gender, sexuality, power, and inequality.

Ignacio Esponda
Associate Professor, Economics | Ph.D., Stanford University

Ignacio Esponda is an Associate Professor and the Walther J. Mead Chair in Economics. He is a microeconomic theorist who focuses on psychological and cognitive processes in economic behavior (game theory and experimental economics).

Erik Eyster
Professor, Economics | Ph.D., UC Berkeley

Erik Eyster is an Profoessor in the Department of Economics. He is an economic theorist who specializes in studying how possibly incorrect beliefs shape strategic interaction in a wide variety of arenas.  His work has been published in journals such as Econometrica, the American Economic Review, the Quarterly Journal of Economics and the Review of Economic Studies.

Young Ji Kim
Assistant Professor, Communication | Ph.D., University of Southern California

Young Ji Kim is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication. She is an organizational communication scholar with research interests in group collaboration, collective intelligence, social and organizational implications of technologies, with particular emphasis on online credibility, computer-supported cooperative work, and crowdsourcing.

Julia Morse
Assistant Professor, Political Science | Ph.D., Princeton University

Julia Morse is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science.Her research focuses on international relations, with particular attention to global governance and international organizations.Professor Morse's book manuscript examines global banking networks as tools of power and coercion, highlighting how international organizations have used such networks to incentivize policy change and drive widespread improvements in compliance.Her work has been published inInternational Studies QuarterlyandReview of International Organizations.Prior to graduate school, Professor Morse worked at the State Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Elana Resnick
Assistant Professor, Anthropology | Ph.D., University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Elana Resnick is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology. She is a cultural anthropologist whose research integrates political anthropology, political economy, and urban ecology to understand social and racial inequality; her current research focuses on Roma trash collectors in Bulgaria.

Joe Walther
Professor, Communication | Ph.D., University of Arizona

Joseph B. Walther is the Director of the UCSB Center for Information Technology and Society, the Mark and Susan Bertelsen Presidential Chair in Technology and Society, and a Distinguished Professor of Communication. A behavioral scientist and theorist, his work concentrates on how people use the Internet to shape social interaction and how mediated communication affects human relationships. Applications of his work in personal relationships, online groups, education settings, and inter-ethnic conflict have had a significant influence across a number of fields. Prior to UCSB, he’s held faculty positions in Singapore, at Michigan State, Cornell, Northwestern, and several European universities. 

Kevin A. Whitehead
Assistant Professor, Sociology | Ph.D., UC Santa Barbara

Kevin A. Whitehead is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology. His primary research areas involve the use of ethnomethodological and conversation analytic approaches to examine race and other categorical forms of social organization and inequality, focusing onways in which racial and other social categories are used, reproduced and resisted in talk-in-interaction. He is also engaged in collaborative projects examining, among other topics, interactional features of conflicts and violence, encounters between police officers and members of the public, and basic structures and practices of talk-in-interaction in ordinary conversational and institutional settings.