Javier Arbona is an Assistant Professor at UC Davis, joint appointed in American Studies and Design . He focuses on race, space, and memory. Arbona is a geographer with a background in architecture and urbanism. Previous to his faculty appointment, Arbona was a Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Davis. His dissertation work in the Geography department at UC Berkeley was supported by a Bancroft Library Award and a Ford Foundation Dissertation Year Grant. In addition, Arbona currently collaborates with Demilit (DM), an experimental arts and writing collective. Arbona’s in-progress book manuscript, based on his dissertation, is tentatively titled: “The City of Radical Memory: Spaces of Home Front Repression and Resistance in the San Francisco Bay Area” – a study of memorial landscapes and erasures of Black resistance against segregation during World War II in the San Francisco Bay Area. Arbona collaborated for several years on archival research and interviews with the UC Berkeley’s Bancroft Library Oral History Office, Rosie the Riveter World War II National Home Front project. Arbona is currently working on new research projects about policing, surveillance, and crisis.

Gabriel J. Chin is Martin Luther King Jr. Professor & Edward L. Barrett Jr. Chair in Law in the School of Law . He has received awards for his scholarship on immigration and Asian Pacific American legal history topics. He has also been honored for his work with students to remedy historical injustices; in 2003, they persuaded Ohio to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment; in 2015, at their urging the California Supreme Court posthumously admitted Hong Yen Chang to the bar, 125 years after he had been excluded because of his race. His current projects include the article The War Against Chinese Restaurants, which identifies a heretofore unknown aspect of subordination of Asian Americans, namely, a decades-long, nationwide campaign to eliminate Chinese restaurants from the United States.

Gregory P. Downs is an Associate Professor of History at UC Davis after previously having been an Assistant then Associate Professor at City College & the Graduate Center, CUNY. He is the author of two history monographs– Declarations of Dependence: The Long Reconstruction of Popular Politics in the South (UNC Press, 2011) and After Appomattox: Military Occupation and the Ends of War (Harvard University Press, 2015)–and of a prize-winning volume of fiction– Spit Baths (University of Georgia Press, 2006)–and co-editor of an edited volume– The World the War Made (UNC Press, 2015). With Kate Masur he is leading historians’ efforts to support the National Park Service project of discussing emancipation and Reconstruction in National Park sites; they co-wrote the NPS theme study, helped edit the first-ever NPS volume on Reconstruction, and have participated in numerous training sessions for NPS staff. He is also the co-developer of a digital history site, Mapping Occupation, selected one of the ten best digital history sites of 2015 by Slate. He has published op/eds in the New York Times, Atlantic, Washington Post, and other publications. Recently he delivered the three-day Brose Lectures at Penn State’s Richards Civil War Era Center, one of the two leading lecture series in the field, and his lectures on the trans-national causes and consequences of the Civil War, will be published in the lecture series by UNC Press.

Ryan Finnigan is Assistant Professor of Sociology at UC Davis. His research examines how macro-level economic, demographic, and institutional changes influence poverty and inequality. Specifically, it focuses on racial/ethnic inequality in metropolitan housing and labor markets in the United States. Related strands of research examine various facets of poverty and inequality in both the US and comparatively. Research questions include: How did longstanding racial/ethnic wage gaps change in the transition to the “new economy”? How do steady declines in White-Black segregation, and increases in White-Latino segregation relate to profound White-minority homeownership gaps? How do welfare states moderate risk profiles for poverty vary across societies?

Angela P. Harris joined the U.C. Davis School of Law (King Hall) faculty in 2011. She began her career at the U.C. Berkeley School of Law in 1989, and has been a visiting professor at the law schools of Stanford, Yale, and Georgetown. In 2010-11, at the State University of New York – University at Buffalo School of Law, she served as vice dean of research and faculty development. She writes widely in the field of critical legal theory, examining how law sometimes reinforces and sometimes challenges subordination on the basis of race, gender, sexuality, class, and other dimensions of power and identity. Her writings have been widely anthologized and have been translated into many languages, from Portuguese to Korean. Her current project examines American farming as a racial project, with a focus on contemporary farmers and gardeners who understand their activity as the work of racial liberation. Harris is the author of a number of widely reprinted and influential articles and essays in critical legal theory. She is also a prolific co-author of casebooks, including Criminal Law: Cases and Materials; Race and Races: Cases and Materials for a Diverse America; Gender and Law; and Economic Justice. Along with Carmen Gonzalez, Gabriella Gutierrez y Muhs, and Yolanda Flores Niemann, she is editor of Presumed Incompetent: The Intersections of Race and Class for Women in Academia (2013), a well-received anthology focused on the experiences of women of color faculty and graduate students.

Bruce Haynes is Associate Professor of Sociology at UC Davis. An authority on race, ethnicity, and urban communities, his publications include The Ghetto: Contemporary Issues and Controversies, and RED LINES, BLACK SPACES: The Politics of Race and Space in a Black Middle-Class Suburb (Yale University Press 2001). Currently, Haynes is contracted with New York University Press for a book entitled “Hear O’ Israel: Voices of African American Jews” about Black Jews in America. This work explores Blacks and Jews as racial projects, while it challenges popular and academic assumptions that don’t imagine Black Jews to exist. His work uses mixed methods to uncover how historical processes of racialization that shape the present. Haynes teaches courses focused primarily race and ethnic inequality, racialized spaces, ethnic communities, and urban society.

Mark Jerng (Co-Director) is Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies of the Department of English at University of California, Davis. His research and teaching interests include Asian American and African American literature, critical race theory, science fiction and fantasy, genre and narrative theory, and law and literature. He is the author of Claiming Others: Transracial Adoption and National Belonging, published by University of Minnesota Press in 2010. He has just finished a second monograph titled Racial Worldmaking, forthcoming from Fordham University Press in 2017. This project reads race in popular genre fiction such as fantasy and science fiction in order to understand the different ways that racial structures organize everyday life. He has published articles in American Literature, Paradoxa, Partial Answers, Arizona Quarterly, and reviews for the LA Review of Books. He is the Director of the UCD SPLASH program, a UC-HBCU initiative that collaborates with Hampton University on a summer graduate pathways program.

Justin Chase Leroy (Co-director) is Assistant Professor of History at UC-Davis. He received his PhD in American Studies at New York University and was a Postdoctoral Fellow in Global American Studies at the Charles Warren Center at Harvard University. His book project is titled, Freedom’s Limit: Racial Capitalism and the Afterlives of Slavery (under contract, Columbia University Press). He co-edited a special issue of Social Text in 2015 and is the author of numerous articles on racial finance, settler colonialism and slavery, and bonded life in Cultural Studies, Journal of American History, and Theory and Event. He teaches courses in African American History, Capitalism and Slavery, and the Black Radical Tradition.

Danielle Heard Mollel is an assistant professor of English at the University of California, Davis. She received an M.A. and Ph.D. from Cornell University and a B.A. from Wesleyan University. She has received fellowships from the Ford, Mellon, and Hellman foundations, the Davis Humanities Institute and participated in the inaugural First Book Institute held at the Center for American Literary Studies at Penn State University. She has published essays in Callaloo, Women & Performance, the Cambridge Companion to James Baldwin, The Rutgers Race & the Law Review, African American Fraternities and Sororities: The Legacy and the Vision, the Oxford African American Studies Center, and The Jim Crow Encyclopedia. Heard’s research and writing over the past few years has been driven by an impulse to identify and explore contemporary black aesthetics and, within this, to address the undertheorized function of comedy as a radical strategy for change. Her book project, Mavericks of Masquerade: Comic Strategies of Post-Blackness, examines the radical strategic impulse of experimental humor in post-black literary and cultural texts that respond specifically to obstacles faced by black artists in the knowledge economy of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The book is driven by the idea that such experimental humor effectively intercedes knowledge capitalism’s branding impulses.

Laurie Lambert is Assistant Professor of African American and African Studies at the University of California, Davis, Her teaching and research interests include African Diaspora Studies, Caribbean literature and cultural history, postcolonial literature and theory, and freedom and slavery studies. She has received several awards including a postdoctoral fellowship in Critical Caribbean Studies at Rutgers University and a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Doctoral Fellowship. She has published articles in Cultural Dynamics, The Round Table, and The CLR James Journal. Her current book project, “Surviving Empire: Postcolonial Revolution and Trauma in the Caribbean,” is a literary and historical analysis of the Grenada Revolution and U.S. imperialism in the region.

Beth Rose Middleton is Associate Professor of Native American Studies at UC Davis. Beth Rose’s research centers on Native environmental policy and Native activism for site protection using conservation tools. Her broader research interests include intergenerational trauma and healing, rural environmental justice, indigenous analysis of climate change, Afro-indigeneity, and qualitative GIS. Beth Rose received her BA in Nature and Culture from UC Davis, and her Ph.D. in Environmental Science, Policy, and Management from UC Berkeley. Her book, Trust in the Land: New Directions in Tribal Conservation (University of Arizona Press 2011), focuses on Native applications of conservation easements, with an emphasis on conservation partnerships led by California Native Nations. Beth Rose has published on Native economic development in Economic Development Quarterly, on political ecology and healing in the Journal of Political Ecology, on Federal Indian law as environmental policy, and the history of the environmental justice movement in The CQ Guide to US Environmental Policy, on mapping allotment lands in Ethnohistory, on using environmental laws for indigenous rights in Environmental Management, on the application of market-based conservation tools to Garifuna site protection in Caribbean Quarterly, on challenges to cultural site protection in Native California in Human Geography, and on indigenous political ecologies in the International Handbook of Political Ecology. She is currently working on a text on the history of Indian land rights and hydroelectric development in northeastern California and a study of the implementation of Senate Bill 18 (the “traditional tribal places law”) and AB-52 (“Native Americans: California Environmental Quality Act”) in California

Jon D. Rossini is Associate Professor in the Department of Theatre and Dance at UC Davis where he teaches courses in Theatre History, Playwriting and Performance Studies. His current research is in the intersections of ethnicity, performance, and geography writ broadly, with a primary focus on contemporary Latinx Theatre. He is the author of Contemporary Latina/o Theater: Wrighting Ethnicity (Southern Illinois University Press, 2008) and twenty articles and book chapters including “Teatro Visión and the Limits of Chicano Politics in Neoliberal Space” in Neoliberalism and Global Theatres: Performance Permutations, “Siting Geography: Octavio Solis and the Circulation of Performance” in Performance, Politics and Activism, “Neoliberalism, Historiography, Identity Politics: Toward a New History of Latino Theatre,” co-authored with Patricia Ybarra, in Radical History Review and “Thinking the Space(s) of Historiography: Latina/o Ethnicity Theatre” in Theatre/Performance Historiography: Time, Space, and Matter.