School for Cultural & Social Transformation

Ana Carolina Antunes

Assistant Professor

Dr. Ana Carolina Antunes is originally from Rio de Janeiro Brazil, but she has lived in Salt Lake City, UT since 2006. She holds a PhD in Education from the Education, Culture &Society Department at the University of Utah and is an Assistant Professor (Lecturer) in the Division of Gender Studies in the same institution. Dr. Antunes develops participatory projects with young people of refugee and immigrant backgrounds in afterschool settings and it is interested in how racialized and gendered readings of bodies mediates relationships in the educational system.

Maile Arvin

Associate Professor

Dr. Maile Arvin is an associate professor of History and Gender Studies at the University of Utah. She is a Native Hawaiian feminist scholar who works on issues of race, gender, science and colonialism in Hawai‘i and the broader Pacific. At the University of Utah, she is part of the leadership of the Pacific Islands Studies Initiative, which was awarded a Mellon Foundation grant to support ongoing efforts to develop Pacific Islands Studies curriculum, programming and student recruitment and support.

Arvin’s first book, Possessing Polynesians: The Science of Settler Colonial Whiteness in Hawaiʻi and Oceania, was published with Duke University Press in 2019. In that book, she analyzes the nineteenth and early twentieth century history of social scientists declaring Polynesians “almost white.” The book argues that such scientific studies contributed to a settler colonial logic of possession through whiteness. In this logic, Indigenous Polynesians (the people) and Polynesia (the place) became the natural possessions of white settlers, since they reasoned that Europeans and Polynesians shared an ancient ancestry. The book also examines how Polynesians have long challenged this logic in ways that regenerate Indigenous ways of relating to each other. Her work has also been published in the journals Meridians, American Quarterly, Native American and Indigenous Studies, Critical Ethnic Studies, The Scholar & Feminist, and Feminist Formations, as well as on the nonprofit independent news site Truthout.

From 2015-17, Arvin was an assistant professor at the University of California, Riverside, in Ethnic Studies. She earned her PhD in Ethnic Studies from the University of California, San Diego. Her dissertation won the American Studies Association’s Ralph Henry Gabriel prize. She is also a former University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellow, Charles Eastman Fellow in Native American Studies at Dartmouth College, and Ford Foundation Pre-doctoral Fellow.

Matthew Basso

Associate Professor

Matt Basso is an Associate Professor of History and Gender Studies at the University of Utah.  His research interests include public history and histories of the U.S. West, masculinity, labor, racial formations, war and society, and Pacific settler colonialism. He is the author or editor of four books including Meet Joe Copper: Masculinity and Race on Montana’s World War II Home Front (University of Chicago Press, 2013), winner of the Philip Taft Labor History Book Award and the American Historical Association’s Pacific Coast Branch Book Award, and a K-12 textbook entitled We Shall Remain: A Native History of Utah and America (American West Center, 2009), part of the Utah American Indian Curriculum Project for which he served as PI and which won the Western History Association’s Autry Public History Prize, the American Association of State and Local History’s Award of Merit, and National Council on Public History’s Project of the Year – Honorable Mention. His most recent articles appear in Settler Colonial Studies, Journal of the West, and Frontiers, and consider industrial settler masculinity, the Popular Front resonances in Buffalo Bill(1944), and soccer, masculinity, and neoliberalism in Mexico respectively. He is currently working on two scholarly projects: a new history of the World War II home front for the National Park Service, which includes training undergraduate and graduate students in public history methods, and a book that uses New Zealand history as a case study to consider settler masculinity through the lens of work and war.

Debjani Chakravarty

Associate Professor, Lecturer

Dr. Debjani Chakravarty is an interdisciplinary scholar with expertise in sociology, gender studies, media studies, and religious studies. Dr. Chakravarty’s research and teaching interests include globalization, nation, and labor; feminist pedagogy and epistemology; feminist and critical theory; gendered new media; issues of gender, sexuality,  religiosity, race, and class within citizenship/belonging.  Her academic and activist work is guided by antiracist and anticolonial praxis.  She has previously worked as a journalist and social worker in India; as award-winning faculty in several universities in the US, and has published academic and artistic works exploring the topic of transnational feminisms, collaborative research ethics, new media representation, sexualities, and epistemic justice. Dr. Chakravarty’s latest research can be found in the journals Sexuality and Culture, Equity and Excellence in Education, and Social & Cultural Geography. She is currently working on a project that explores the meaning and implications of gendered invisible labor.

David De Micheli

Assistant Professor

David De Micheli is Assistant Professor of Political Science and Ethnic Studies. De Micheli’s research interests include ethnic and identity politics, inequality, and citizenship with a regional focus on Latin America. His current book project examines state-led educational expansion as a cause of shifting patterns of racial identification in Brazil. This project is based on his doctoral dissertation, which was awarded the best dissertation prize from the Race and Ethnic Politics section of the American Political Science Association. You can find his research published in World Politics and Latin American Politics and Society. De Micheli teaches courses on comparative politics, identity politics, and race and ethnicity in Latin America, among others.

Donna Deyhle

Professor Emeritus

Edmund Fong

Associate Professor

Edmund Fong is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science and the Division of Ethnic Studies. Additionally, he currently serves as the Chair of Ethnic Studies. His research interests lie in examining the constitutive role of racial politics in the development of American political culture and American political institutions. He has published in journals and anthologies such as Political Research Quarterly, Politics, Groups, and Identities, and the Oxford Handbook of Racial and Ethnic Politics in the U.S. His book, American Exceptionalism and the Remains of Race: Multicultural Exorcisms was published in July 2014 by Routledge Press through their Routledge Series on Identity Politics. He is currently working on a new book on how we tell time through race in American politics. He teaches broadly in the fields of Political Science and Ethnic Studies, from courses on the American Presidency to Racial/Ethnic Politics to seminars on Politics & Literature.

Annie Isabel Fukushima

Associate Professor

Dr. Annie Isabel Fukushima is Associate Dean of Undergraduate Studies, Director of the Office of Undergraduate Research, and Associate Professor in the Division of Ethnic Studies, and author of Migrant Crossings: Witnessing Human Trafficking in the US(Stanford University Press, 2019), which examines the experiences and representations of Asian and Latina/o migrants trafficked in the United States into informal economies and service industries.

As an interdisciplinary scholar, she committed to praxis, therefore she has worked at all levels of organizations, where her expertise is nationally recognized; she has served as an expert witness for human trafficking cases in courts in California, Colorado, and Utah, provided expert reports for immigration cases submitted to USCIS, and a consultant for national and local organizations in California and Washington. She has authored multiple community based studies that focus on domestic violence, sexual assault, human trafficking, labor, and migration.

Claudia Geist

Associate Professor

Claudia Geist (she/her) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and the Division of Gender Studies, where she serves as the interim chair in AY 23/24. She studies inequality in many forms, both in the United States and with a comparative perspective, to understand the theoretical connections between gendered institutions, social context, and behavior. Her recent work examines the gendered division of labor, contraception and pregnancy intentions, as well as theoretical and measurement approaches to gender, sexuality, and family.

Erin Graham

Associate Professor Lecturer

Erin Graham is an Associate Professor (Career-Line Teaching Faculty) in Ethnic Studies and Gender Studies, and she is the Associate Chair for the Division of Gender Studies. Her wide-ranging teaching experience has included courses in Chicano/Latino Studies, Gender Studies, History, and Interdisciplinary Social Science and Humanities courses. She is passionate about pedagogy, and she delights in welcoming students from all different disciplinary backgrounds into her courses. Her teaching is informed by her research background in Latin American, Mexican, and Borderlands History, in which she focuses on gender, childhood, family, labor, migration, and environmental justice. Dr. Graham is also a dedicated and strong community engaged scholar and organizer.

Kimberly Jew

Associate Professor

Kimberly Jew holds a joint appointment in Theatre and Ethnic Studies. She teaches a wide range of topics ranging from Asian American and Pacific Islander studies, to theatre history, dramatic literature, and script analysis. Her expertise lies in 20th century American theatre. She has directed numerous university productions and has composed and edited a collaborative performance project based on local letters to the editor. Dr. Jew has written on a variety of topics, exploring the intersections of feminism, postcolonialism, theatrical experimentation and ethnic identity. Her essays can be found in the journals of Pacific Asia Inquiry, MELUS, and in the edited collections, Literary Gestures (Temple University), and Seeking Home (University of Tennessee Press), to name a few. She is currently co-editor of Frontiers, a Women Studies Journal. Dr. Jew received her doctorate from New York University, master’s from Georgetown University and bachelor’s from UC Berkeley.

Ed Muñoz

Associate Professor

Dr. Ed A. Muñoz is an Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies and an Adjunct Associate Professor of Sociology. In general, his research expertise deals with the Latinx experience in the Inter-Rocky Mountain region of the United States. His criminal justice research agenda examines how racialization processes impact criminal justice outcomes for racial/ethnic minority populations. He is currently examining the effectiveness of Salt Lake Peer Court on youth recidivism. A longer term project is a socio-historical analysis on the construction of Latinidad in the Inter-Rocky Mountain West dating from the 16th century and into the 21st century.

Wanda Pillow

Professor

Wanda S. Pillow is Professor in Gender Studies at the U where she offers courses in qualitative research methods; gender, race and sexuality studies; race, feminism and poststructural and theories; and educational policy. Her work focuses on intersectional analyses of the relationship between subjectivity and representation (historically, legally, discursively and textually) and on tracing what this means and looks like methodologically and theoretically across cultural productions, policy, and embodied praxis. Resulting projects include tracing colonial relations of gender, race and sexuality through Sacajawea and York of the 1804-1806 Corps of Discovery expedition; methodological essays; and on-going participation in research and efforts for the educational rights of young mothers. Professor Pillow is committed to mentoring students and emerging scholars and participates in several national professional organizations. She is also a Co-Editor of Frontiers–A Journal of Women Studies.

Sarah Projansky

Professor

Sarah Projansky is Associate Vice President for Faculty on main campus. She holds a joint-appointment as Professor of Film & Media Arts and of Gender Studies, and is an Adjunct Professor of Communication. Sarah has published two books, Spectacular Girls: Media Fascination and Celebrity Culture and Watching Rape: Film and Television in Postfeminist Culture, and she is co-editor of Enterprise Zones: Critical Positions on Star Trek. As well, she has published articles on feminist and Asian American independent cinema, news media and Title IX, and feminist media studies.

Sarah’s courses include Film Theory, Introduction to TV, Gender and Contemporary Issues, Girl Films, Film and Television Stars, and Feminist Girls’ Media Studies. She has been a member of numerous dissertation committees and MFA committees, and she has directed many undergraduate honors theses.

Charles Sepulveda

Assistant Professor

Charles Sepulveda (Tongva and Acjachemen) is an Assistant Professor in Ethnic Studies. He is currently at work on his first book project tentatively titled, Indigenous Nations v. Junípero Serra: Resisting the Spanish Imaginary, which analyzes the development of what he has named the Spanish Imaginary, a play on Emma Perez’s “colonial imaginary” – the historiography produced through the traditional discipline of history silencing and ignoring people of color, women and sexuality. His recent publication, Our Sacred Waters: Theorizing Kuuyam as a Decolonial Possibility, Sepulveda analyzes the desecration of the Santa Ana River in southern California and critically traces the logics of domestication that impact both Native peoples and our environments.

William Smith

Professor

In 2003, Dr. Smith was awarded the Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Research Fellowship to further develop his theoretical concept of Racial Battle Fatigue. Racial Battle Fatigue is an interdisciplinary theoretical framework that provides a clearer method for understanding the race-related experiences of People of Color. In general, Racial Battle Fatigue explains how the social environment (e.g., institutions, policies, practices, traditions, groups and individuals) perpetuates race-related stressors that adversely affect the health and academic achievement of Students of Color and the health, professional productivity, and retention among Faculty of Color. Professor Smith’s additional research interests are inter-ethnic relations, racial attitudes, racial identity & socialization, academic colonialism, affirmative action attitudes, and the impact of student diversity on university and college campuses.

Majd Subih

Postdoctoral Fellow

Dr. Majd Subih has a Ph.D. in Education, with a specialization in Sociocultural and Community-based Approaches, from the School of Education at the University of Delaware. Her dissertation considers the intersectionality of disability (including sensory, mental, and illness-related impairments), religion (specifically Islam), ethnicity (pertaining to Arab Americans), and gender (encompassing females, males, and nonbinary individuals) in the United States. Specifically, her research explores how Arab American Muslims with disabilities make sense of their disability identity. She is originally from Jordan and completed her undergraduate degree in Modern Languages (with a focus on Spanish and English) at the University of Jordan, with a specialization in literature and language pedagogy. She has two master’s degrees from Villanova University, in Hispanic Studies and Teacher Leadership.

Myra Washington

Associate Professor