New Faculty 2023-24

Candice Lyons
Assistant Professor, Black Studies | Ph.D., University of Texas at Austin

Candice Lyons is the Black Star Assistant Professor of Black Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she previously served as a Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow in History and Black Studies Dissertation Scholar. Her work can be found on the public history site Not Even Past as well as in the 2022 E3W Review of Books, for which she served as co-editor. Lyons’ 2021 Feminist Studies article “Behind the Scenes: Elizabeth Keckley, Slave Narratives, and the Queer Complexities of Space” is the winner of the 2020 Feminist Studies Graduate Student Award. She is currently completing her first monograph, which stages queer investigations into the types of stories it becomes possible to tell when the archive is approached without the base assumption of cisheteronormativity.

Jessica López-Espino
Assistant Professor, Sociology | Ph.D., New York University

Dr. López-Espino’s research areas include language ideologies, racialization, courts, interpreting, and ethnography.  She is currently completing a book manuscript tentatively titled, Hearing Child Welfare: Ideologies of Latinx Parenthood in a California Juvenile Dependency Court. In this book, she examines the role of language, racialization, and socioeconomic status in legal determinations of parental fitness to regain or maintain custody of their children following Child Protective Services investigations of Mexican, Guatemalan, Nicaraguan, Honduran and Salvadoran families. Her research has been published in American Anthropologist, Law and Social Inquiry, and the edited volume Metalinguistic Communities: Case Studies of Agency, Ideology, and Symbolic Uses of Language. Dr. López-Espino's primary teaching areas are sociology of law, language and law, and ethnographic methods.

Jigna Desai
Professor, Feminist Studies & Asian American Studies | Ph.D., University of Minnesota

Jigna Desai is Professor in the Department of Feminist Studies and the Department of Asian American Studies and the inaugural director for the Center for Feminist Futures. She is the author of Beyond Bollywood: The Cultural Politics of South Asian Diasporic Film (Routledge 2004) and co-editor of several collections including Bollywood: A Reader (Open University 2009), Transnational Feminism and Global Advocacy in South Asia (Routledge 2012), and Asian Americans in Dixie: Race and Migration in the South (University of Illinois Press 2013). They have written extensively on Asian American feminism as well as issues of race, gender, sexuality and media.

Renee Houston
Teaching Professor, Communication | Ph.D., The Florida State University

Renee Houston ( Ph.D., The Florida State University) is an engaged communication teacher/scholar focused on developing stigma-based approaches to understanding social identity inequities that inform communication theory as well as organizational policy and practice. Other interests include identifying and implementing organizational practices that support employee empowerment, collaboration, and healthy work lives. In her community-based work, she’s committed to social learning practices that decenter expertise and create space for open, respectful, and collaborative solutions. Renee’s courses focus on exploring emotion, work-life and well-being, community-based change, and social identities in organizations. In the classroom, she seeks to bring voice, connection, and inquiry to her students that inspires them to find their life's purpose. She is also an experienced higher education administrator with an extensive background in mentoring and program development. Her program for college work study students was recognized with an award from the National Association of Colleges and Employers.

Caleb Luna
Assistant Professor, Feminist Studies | Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley

Caleb Luna is a writer, performer and award-winning educator and scholar. They are the bestselling author of REVENGE BODY (Nomadic Press, 2022), and co-host of the podcast Unsolicited: Fatties Talk Back. Publishing, performing and curating across genre and medium, Caleb's cultural work reads, responds to and challenges tropes and discourses regarding race, size, sexuality and disability in media and culture. Caleb holds a Ph.D. in Performance Studies with a Designated Emphasis in Gender and Women’s Studies from the University of California, Berkeley. They are a former UC President’s and Mellon Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow and are currently an Assistant Professor of Feminist Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Jiaying Liu
Associate Professor, Communication | Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania

Jiaying Liu received her Ph.D. in Communication from the University of Pennsylvania. She joined the Department of Communication at UCSB as an Associate Professor in July 2023. Her research focuses on health communication, persuasion and social influence, message effects, computational and psychophysiological methods. Jiaying’s recent projects include longitudinal analyses on nationally representative survey data to identify factors predisposing youth to substance use, online and eye-tracking experiments to identify persuasive message features and inform campaign design, machine-based textual analysis with large media text corpora, and neuroimaging studies to examine the underlying mechanisms of successful and counterproductive communication. Jiaying is actively involved in highly collaborative, interdisciplinary work. Her research has been published in leading communication, public health, and psychology journals. Jiaying directs the Communication, Health, and Emerging Media Laboratory (CHARM Lab) and currently serves as the principal investigator on NIH K01 and R21 awards.

Tagart Cain Sobotka
Assistant Teaching Professor, Sociology | Ph.D., Stanford University 

Tagart Cain Sobotka is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Department of Sociology. His teaching and research interests are in the areas of gender, social psychology, and substance use. In one line of research, he illustrates how conflicting conceptions of addiction and recovery negatively impact the relationships and well-being of people who use opioids and their families. In a second line of work, he examines the ways that diffuse gender beliefs and social psychological mechanisms, such as status threat, push men to act in ways that reinforce gender inequality. As a first-generation college student whose academic career began at a California community college, he strives to increase the accessibility and inclusivity of academia as both a teacher and mentor. Prior to arriving at UCSB, he was a Teaching Fellow with Stanford University’s COLLEGE program, where he also received his PhD in sociology. 

Max H. Farrell
Associate Professor, Economics | Ph.D., University of Michigan

Max H. Farrell studies econometric theory and applied econometrics.His research focus on machine learning, high-dimensional data, and robust semiparametric methods, with a focus on increasing reliability and implementability in data analysis. His publications appear in the Review of Economics and Statistics, the Journal of Econometrics, the Annals of Statistics, the Journal of the American Statistical Association, and others. Farrell earned a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Michigan, as well as an M.A. in statistics. Farrell pursued undergraduate studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he earned S.B. degrees in mathematics and economics. He has experience teaching statistics and econometrics at the undergraduate, masters, and graduate level. Prior to his graduate studies, Farrell worked at the Center for Research on Health Care at the University of Pittsburgh and at Analysis Group, Inc, where he worked on a variety of statistical and economic consulting issues.

David Silver
Assistant Professor, Economics | Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley

David Silver is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics. His research focuses on health economics, largely in the US context, with a focus on provider behavior and productivity, as well as the effects of government programs on health care access and health outcomes. Professor Silver received his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2016, and previously served as an Assistant Professor of Economics and Public Affairs at Princeton University, and as an Economist at Amazon.com.

New Faculty 2020-21

Alexander Cho
Assistant Professor, Asian American Studies | Ph.D., University of Texas at Austin

Alexander Cho is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Asian American Studies. He researches how people use social media with a focus on race, gender, and sexuality, using an approach that blends queer of color critique, ethnography, and human-centered design. He is co-author of The Digital Edge: How Black and Latino Youth Navigate Digital Inequality (NYU Press), co-editor of the forthcoming a tumblr book: platform and cultures (Michigan, November 2020), and lead author of a recent UNICEF report on youth digital civic engagement. He is currently working on a monograph exploring queer youth of color social media use.

Debanuj DasGupta
Assistant Professor, Feminist Studies | Ph.D., The Ohio State University 

Dr. Debanuj DasGupta is an Assistant Professor of Feminist Studies at UCSB. His research and teaching focuses on immigration detention, queer migrations and the global governance of migration, sexuality, and HIV. He serves on the political geography editorial board of the Geography Compass and is Board-Co Chair of the Center for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Studies: CLAGS at the City University of New York. He is the recipient of the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) funded Junior Scholar Award in Transregional Studies: Inter Asian Contexts & Connections; Global Challenges Research Fund Networking Award, The British Department for International Development, Ford Foundation funded New Voices Fellowship, American Association of Geographers and National Science Foundation funded T. J. Reynolds National Award in Disability Studies, and the International AIDS Society’s Emerging Activist Award. His research has been published in journals such as Disability Studies Quarterly; SEXUALITIES; Gender, Place, and Culture & Contemporary South Asia.

Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky
Assistant Professor, Global Studies | Ph.D., Stanford University 

Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He specializes in global migration and forced displacement, and the history of the Ottoman and Russian empires and their successor states in the Middle East and Eastern Europe. He is broadly interested in the evolution of humanitarianism, refugee regimes, and ethnic cleansing as a global practice. He is currently preparing a book manuscript on the resettlement of Muslim refugees from Russia's North Caucasus region throughout the Ottoman Middle East and Balkans between the 1850s and World War I.

Kristy Hamilton
Assistant Professor, Communication | Ph.D., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Kristy Hamilton is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication. She is a digital media scholar who uses experimental methods from cognitive psychology to understand the inherent qualities or liabilities of human memory and cognition in a digital environment. Her current research program investigates three interrelated characteristics of sophisticated thinkers in our digital landscape: 1) understanding how various cognitive strategies made possible by digital media influence short- and long- term communicative and cognitive goals, 2) knowing how media users monitor and control the state of information available “in the head” and information out in the world in pursuit of their various goals, and 3) understanding how certain characteristics of technology can impair these monitoring and control processes. She has published in journals such as Computers in Human Behavior, Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition, Applied Cognitive Psychology, and New Media & Society.

Celia Herrera Rodriguez
Lecturer, Chicana/o Studies 

Bio to come.

Ricado Jacobs
Assistant Professor, Global Studies | Ph.D., Johns Hopkins University

Ricardo Jacobs is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He earned his PhD in Sociology at Johns Hopkins University. His research focuses on the global political economy of urbanization, ecology and agrarian change, with a focus on post-colonial Africa. His work examines how global colonial-racial capitalism and class struggle from below shapes race, ethnicity, gender and class at the local and global level. His recent article—“An Urban Proletariat with Peasant Characteristics: Land Occupations and Livestock Raising in South Africa”—won the 2017-2018 Krishna Bharadwaji and Eric Wolf Prize from the Journal of Peasant Studies and the Terence K. Hopkins award from the Political Economy of the World System section of the American Sociological Association. He serves as Book Review Section co–editor of the Journal of Peasant Studies. Prior to entering the PhD program, he worked for more than 15 years in the area of land and agrarian reform, food sovereignty, agro-ecology and agrarian social movement building in South Africa.

Tae-Yeoun Keum
Assistant Professor, Political Science | Ph.D., Harvard University

Tae-Yeoun Keum is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is a political theorist with broad research interests in the history of political thought, ancient and modern, and in the symbolic dimensions of politics. Her first book, Plato and the Mythic Tradition in Political Thought (Harvard University Press, 2020), examines the legacy of Plato’s myths in modern political thought. She is currently working on a book about Hans Blumenberg, the 20th century philosopher of myth. Prior to joining UCSB, Tae-Yeoun was the Christopher Tower Junior Research Fellow at Christ Church, Oxford.

Dana Kornberg
Assistant Professor, Sociology | Ph.D., University of Michigan

Dana Kornberg is an Assistant Professor of Sociology studying issues of urban sustainability in India and the United States. She is interested in understanding how environmental systems are shaped by enduring legacies of race, caste, and geographic division. Her research examining the provision of clean water in Detroit and Flint, and waste collection systems in Delhi, has been published in the International Journal of Urban & Regional Research (best article award), Critical Sociology, and Local Environment. She is currently working on a book manuscript that examines how renewed relations based on caste and community have upheld manual systems of informal recycling in Delhi, despite the introduction of collection trucks and incinerators. Social theory has been vital to her political awakening, provoking her to join struggles for social transformation and justice. 

Yader R. Lanuza
Assistant Professor, Sociology | Ph.D., University of Irvine

Yader R. Lanuza is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at UC Santa Barbara. His research examines the causes and consequences of social inequality in three domains: education, family and the criminal justice system. He focuses largely, though not exclusively, on the experiences of immigrants and their offspring from Latin America and Asia.

Daniel Masterson
Assistant Professor, Political Science | Ph.D., Yale University

Daniel Masterson is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Daniel’s research explores conflict between refugees and host communities, refugee decision making about when and where to migrate, and how refugees cooperate in order to support themselves, with a regional focus in the Middle East. Daniel’s work has appeared in the American Political Science Review and the Journal of Conflict Resolution. Before joining UCSB, Daniel was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Immigration Policy Lab at Stanford University. He received his PhD in political science from Yale University, a Master in Public Policy from Harvard Kennedy School, and a BA from Bates College.

Muniba Saleem
Associate Professor, Communication | Ph.D., Iowa State University

Muniba Saleem is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at UC Santa Barbara. Dr. Saleem is a social psychologist by training and her research examines how the media influences interpersonal and intergroup relations between racial, ethnic, and religious groups. Recent work focuses on three areas: 1) how racial, ethnic, and religious minorities' social, psychological and political outcomes are affected by the media they consume, 2) how users respond to hate content on social media sites, and 3) communicative challenges that arise in race and race-related dialogue. Dr. Saleem's work has been published in journals such as Communication Research, Journal of Communication, Child Development, and Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. Her research has been funded by the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, and Facebook.

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