The UCLA American Indian Studies Center has affiliated faculty from all over campus.
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Professor Stephen Acabado
UCLA Department of Anthropology
Email: acabado@ucla.edu
Research Focus
Historical ecology, landscape archaeology, agricultural systems, settlement patterns, emergent complexity, indigenous peoples; Southeast Asia, Philippines, Guam, Micronesia.
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Associate Professor Randall Akee
Department of Public Policy
Email: rakee@ucla.edu
Research Focus
Areas of interest include economic development, ethnicity and development politics, immigration, labor and employment.
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Professor Stephen Aron
Department of History
Email: saron@history.ucla.edu
Research Focus
Frontiers and borderlands in North America.
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Associate Professor Maylei Blackwell
Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies
Email: maylei@chavez.ucla.edu
Research Focus
U.S. women of color feminist theory, Women’s social movements in Mexico, Transnational organizing, Queer of color genealogies, oral history and ethnography.
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Assistant Professor Tria Blu Wakpa
Department of World Arts and Culture/Dance
Email: triabluwakpa@arts.ucla.edu
Research Focus
A scholar and practitioner of Indigenous contemporary dance, North American Hand Talk (Indigenous sign language), martial arts, and yoga. Her research combines community-based, Indigenous and feminist methodologies with critical race theories to examine the politics and practices of dance and embodiment historically and contemporarily in educational and carceral institutions for Indigenous peoples.
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Professor Tara Browner
Department of Ethnomusicology
Email: tbrowner@ucla.edu
Research Focus
Her current research focus is on manifestations of pow-wow culture in Northern Europe. Native North American music and dance; Native North American contemporary music; musical imagery of Indians in popular culture; indigenous concepts of music theory; American music.
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Associate Professor Keith Camacho
Department of Asian American Studies
Email: kcamacho@ucla.edu
Research Focus
Chamorro cultural and historical memory, as well as American and Japanese colonialism in Asia and Oceania. Current research includes Samoan youth violence, health, and justice in Auckland, Aotearoa, and Los Angeles, California.
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Associate Professor Jessica Cattelino
Department of Anthropology
Email: jesscatt@anthro.ucla.edu
Research Focus
Associate Professor Cattelino's research focuses on economy, nature, indigeneity, and settler colonialism. She studies and teaches about sociocultural life in the contemporary United States.
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Lecturer Jaye Darby TEP Faculty Advisor
Department of Education
Email: jdarby@ucla.edu
Research Focus
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Associate Professor Erin Debenport
Department of Anthropology
Associate Director of the UCLA American Indian Studies Center
Email: erindebenport@ucla.edu
Research Focus
I am a linguistic and sociocultural anthropologist, interested in technologies of language circulation, secrecy and (in)visibility, indigeneity and sovereignty, and critical language documentation. My work is concentrated in the Pueblo Southwest and the Mexico-Texas-New Mexico border region.
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Professor Linda Garro
Department of Anthropology
Email: lgarro@anthro.ucla.edu
Research Focus
Health care decision making; health and illness in everyday life contexts; cultural models; narrative and illness; remembering
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Professor Hanay Geiogamah
Department of Televison, Film, and Theater
Email: hgeiog@ucla.edu
Research Focus
American Indian dance and theater.
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Associate Professor Mishuana Goeman
Department of Gender Studies
Email: goeman@gender.ucla.edu
Research Focus
Native American Literature, 20th Century American Literature, Race and Ethnic Theory
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Professor Patricia Greenfield
Department of Psychology
Email: greenfield@psych.ucla.edu
Research Focus
My central theoretical and research interest is in the relationship between social change, culture, and human development. I have studied three generations of child development and socialization in a Maya community in Chiapas, Mexico as the community experienced a radical shift in their way of life and economy from subsistence and agriculture to money and commerce. This research led to a theory of social change, cultural evolution, and human development, first published in 2009. With collaborators in many parts of the world, the theory has generated studies of social change, cultural evolution, and human development in the U.S., Israel, China, and various regions of Mexico.
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Professor Felicia Hodge
School of Nursing and Public Health
Email: fhodge@sonnet.ucla.edu
Research Focus
Health issues and developing and testing culturally sensitive intervention models for American Indian populations.
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Professor Paul Kroskrity
Department of Anthropology
Email: paulvk@ucla.edu
Research Focus
Language and culture, language contact, language and identity, language ideologies, anthropology and verbal art, and the ethnography of communication; American Indian Languages (especially the Kiowa-Tanoan and Uto-Aztecan families); the Pueblo Southwest, Central California.
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Associate Professor Benjamin Madley
Department of History
Email: madley@ucla.edu
Research Focus
He writes about California Indians as well as colonial genocides in Africa, Australia, and Europe, often applying a transnational and comparative approach.
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Assistant Professor Ananda Marin
Department of Education
Email: marin@gseis.ucla.edu
Research Focus
I explore questions about the socio-cultural dimensions of learning and development in everyday and intergenerational contexts. In one line of work I examine the practices that children and families use to reason and build knowledge about the natural world. I am particularly interested in (1) how families coordinate attention and observation while participating in science activities, (2) how mobility and place structure activity and (3) cultural variability in sensemaking practices such as question-asking and explaining. I also investigate Native American participation in STEM and cultural models of self as related to senses of capability and competence. Across my scholarship, I take a participatory approach and employ a variety of research designs and methods including: community-based design research, cognitive tasks, studies of everyday practices, content analysis, discourse analysis, interaction analysis and video-ethnography. Through my work I aim to answer basic research questions about development, innovate methods, and design teaching and learning tools that contribute to the goals and well-being of Indigenous and non-dominant communities.
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Assistant Professor Kyle T. Mays
Department of African American Studies
Email: mayskyle@ucla.edu
Research Focus
Indigenous Studies, Critical Ethnic Studies, and Indigenous popular culture.
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Professor Vickie Mays
Department of Psychology
Email: maysv@nicco.sscnet.ucla.edu/a>
Research Focus
Mental health in ethnic minority communities and women.
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Professor Teresa McCarty
UCLA Graduate School of Education & Information Studies
Email: teresa.mccarty@ucla.edu
Research Focus
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Professor Nancy Marie Mithlo
Department of Gender Studies
Email: mithlo@ucla.edu
Research Focus
Visual anthropology, Indigenous visual arts and curation, gender analysis, film studies, photographic archives, museum critique, arts education and Indigenous knowledge production; Native North America, globalized popular culture.
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Assistant Professor Ho'esta Mo'e'hahne
Department of English
Email: moehahne@ucla.edu
Research Focus
Critical Indigenous studies; Indigenous literature of North America, Queer Indigenous Literature; Sexuality and Gender studies; Queer theory; Decolonial thought; Settler imperialism; Comparative studies of empire and race; Cultural studies
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Professor Emeritus Pamela Munro
Department of Linguistics
Email: munro@ucla.edu
Research Focus
My primary research involves the study of all aspects of the grammar of a number of different American Indian languages (currently focusing on Chickasaw, San Lucas Quiavinà Zapotec and other varieties of Tlacolula Valley Zapotec, Pima, Gabrielino / Tongva / Fernandeño, Lakhota, Tolkapaya Yavapai, and Garifuna, and among others) and language families (especially Muskogean, Uto-Aztecan, Yuman, and Zapotecan) — their syntax, phonology, lexicon, history — both through fieldwork with native speakers and through comparative research and analysis of existing descriptions. In the field of syntax, I am often concerned with problems of agreement, reference, and subjecthood. I consider it vital to make linguistic findings available to native speakers and other interested laymen through accurate, accessible descriptive and pedagogical materials, including dictionaries. I am particularly interested in working out better ways to make dictionaries, since I feel that this process generally illuminates most aspects of grammar.
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Professor Peter Nabokov
Department of World Arts & Cultures/Dance
Email: pnabokov@arts.ucla.edu
Research Focus
Ethnographic and ethnohistorical research with Native American communities throughout North America.
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Associate Professor Stella Nair
Department of Art History
Email: snair@humnet.ucla.edu
Research Focus
Stella Nair's scholarship focuses on the built environment of indigenous communities in the Americas and is shaped by her interests in construction technology, spatial theory, material culture studies, landscape transformations, cross-cultural exchange, and hemispheric networks. Trained as an architect and architectural historian (University of California, Berkeley), Nair has conducted fieldwork in Bolivia, Mexico, Peru, and the United States, with ongoing projects in the South Central Andes.
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Professor Ellen Pearlstein
Department of Information Studies
Email: epearl@ucla.edu
Research Focus
Conservation and preservastion practices in tribal museums; inclusion of community prinicples in conservation practice.
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Distinguished Professor Sherene Razack
Department of Gender Studies
Email: sherenerazack@ucla.edu
Research Focus
Her research focuses on racial violence.
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Professor Angela R. Riley
School of Law
Email: riley@law.ucla.edu
Research Focus
Her research focuses on issues related to indigenous peoples’ rights, with a particular emphasis on cultural property and Native governance.
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Dr. Gaspar Rivera-Salgado
Project Director at the Labor Center
Email: grsalgado@irle.ucla.edu
Research Focus
He is currently Project Director at UCLA Center for Labor Research and Education where he teaches classes on Work, Labor and Social Justice in the US and immigration issues. He also directs the Institute for Transnational Social Change. He has extensive experience as an independent consultant on transnational migration, race and ethnic relations and diversity trainings for large organizations.
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Assistant Professor Desi Rodriguez-Lonebear
Department of Sociology
Email: desisr@soc.ucla.edu
Research Focus
Survey research in partnership with Indigenous communities and other marginalized populations. Indigenous studies, sociology of race and ethnicity, political sociology, sociology of knowledge, critical demography, health policy research, and science and technology studies.
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Assistant Professor Christine Samuel-Nakamura
School of Nursing
Email: cnakamura@sonnet.ucla.edu
Research Focus
Areas of Scholarly Expertise and Interest Community environmental health research, heavy metal contamination, AI health, behavioral health, healthcare, and research.
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Associate Professor Greg Schachner
Department of Anthropology
Email: gschachner@anthro.ucla.edu
Research Focus
Transformations in leadership and social structure in ancient farming societies.
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Professor David Shorter
Department of World Arts and Culture/Dance
Email: shorter@ucla.edu
Research Focus
Cultural studies, epistemology, ethnography, history of science, ontology, paranormal studies, and colonialisms.
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Professor Shannon Speed
Department of Gender Studies and Anthropology
Director of the UCLA American Indian Studies Center
Email: sspeed@aisc.ucla.edu
Research Focus
Indigenous Latin American women migrants and gender violence
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Professor Ramesh Srinivasan
Department of Information Studies
Email: srinivasan@gseis.ucla.edu
Research Focus
Development of information systems within the context of culturally-differentiated communities.
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Dr. Wendy Teeter
Curator of Archaeology, Fowler Museum at UCLA; UCLA Repatriation Coordinator
Email: wteeter@arts.ucla.edu
Research Focus
Teeter collaborates nationally and internationally with Indigenous communities on issues of repatriation, Indigenous archaeology and cultural heritage protection, especially in Southern California. She is Co-PI for Mapping Indigenous Los Angeles, a community-based website devoted to storytelling through cultural geography and map making on Tongva and Tataviam lands as well as providing educational resources and curriculum and for Carrying our Ancestors Home, which tells the history of repatriation at UCLA and stories of repatriation from Indigenous communities.
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Professor Kevin Terraciano
Department of History
Email: terra@history.ucla.edu
Research Focus
Latin American history, especially Mexico and the Indigenous cultures and languages of central and southern Mexico (especially Nahuatl, Mixtec, and Zapotec) in the colonial period.
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Associate Professor Aradhna Tripati
Center for Diverse Leadership in Science Director & P.I., Institute of Environment and Sustainability, Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, Earth, Planetary, and Space Science
Email: atripati@g.ucla.edu
Research Focus
Climate change; the history and dynamics of changing Earth systems including climate, ice sheets, oceans, the water cycle, carbon dioxide levels; tool development; and clumped isotope geochemistry.
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