Faculty

• Second language acquisition
• Hispanic women literature
• Hispanic culture
• Puerto Rican literature and culture
• Representations of Domestic Violence on Hispanic Cultures

• STEM education
• Bilingualism
• Disciplinary Literacy
• Assessment and Evaluation
• Teacher Development

• Organized crime
• Criminal governance

• Archaeology
• Quantitative methods
• Geographic information systems
• Hunters and gatherers
• Andean Preceramic and Formative, Central Asia and Tibet

• African History, especially 19th and early 20th century Sierra Leone.

• Climate Action
• Political Sociology
• Environmental Sociology
• Globalization
• Social movements

• Immigrants and Immigration Policy
• Labor Economics
• Health, Education and Public Economics
• Crime and Incarceration

• Early Modern Britain and the Atlantic World
• Early Modern Gender and Race
• Social and cultural history
• History and Literature

• Mesoamerican Indigenous literatures and cultures
• Central American & Latina/o cultural studies

• Auditory Cognitve Neuroscience
• Auditory Perception
• Speech Perception
• Hearing Loss
• Development and Aging
• Bilingualism

• Black Feminism
• Black Studies
• Film
• Education

• Sensorimotor neuroscience
• Complex systems
• Perception
• Action

• Labor Economics
• Public Economics
• Education, Health and Inequality

• Ethnomusicology 
• Anthropology
• South Asian studies
• Indian Cinema (Bollywood)
• Popular Musics
• Gateway to Merced (community-engaged research)

• Sociology of education
• Social inequality (race/class/gender/sexuality)
• Social capital
• Adolescent transitions to adulthood

• Infant development
• Speech perception
• Language processing
• Cochlear implants
• fNIRS
• Optical imaging

My research focuses on environmental exposures and their health impacts, particularly in children. My overall goal is to conduct research that informs policies to improve public health.

• Shakespeare and performance
• Theatre in community
• Practice as research and community-engaged research
• Eco-theatre and eco-criticism
• Medieval and Renaissance drama

• Health Economics
• Behavioral Economics
• Health Services Research
• Farmworkers Health

• Global health
• Social inequalities in health/health disparities
• Health behavior
• Cancer
• Oral health
• Medical anthropology
• Clinical trials recruitment/research participation
• Refugees
• Survivorship
• Immigration

• Global Romanticism
• World Poetry
• Ecocriticism
• Digital Humanities

• Health communications and interventions for changing health behaviors
• Imagery and affective processes influencing risk perceptions and behavior
• Smoking prevention
• Interventions for promoting adjustment during cancer treatment and survivorship

• Writing to Enhance Learning (Across the Curriculum)
• Resiliency Theory
• Self-Efficacy Development
• Faculty Development in Pedagogy

• American literature and culture — from 18th century poet Joel Barlow to the television cartoon "Beavis and Butt-Head"
• Ethical and esthetic debates of the 19th century, concentrating on the works of Mark Twain, American literary humor, literary sentimentalism and domesticity

• Spatial data analysis
• Hierarchical modeling
• Finite population estimation
• Geographic health disparities

• South Asian and Islamic Art and Architectural History
• Colonial and Post/Colonial Studies
• Space  Identity
• Empire & Space
• Gender Studies

• Environmental health
• Effects of air quality on health
• Forest fires
• Asthma
• Environmental Epidemiology, Water and Health

• Health Promotion
• Health Education
• Pedagogy
• Teaching and Learning

• Comparative politics
• Political economy
• South Asia

• Atlantic history
• Early American history
• African diaspora 

• Collective identity
• Social memory
• The nation-state
• Migration and transnationalism
• Political Anthropology
• Community engaged scholarship

• Political psychology
• Economic insecurity
• Risk and decision-making
• Political behavior

• Structural equation models
• Finite mixture models
• Longitudinal models
• Bayesian latent variable modeling
• Bayesian model mis-specification
• Categorical latent variable models

• Art patronage
• Family
• Gender
• Women
• Italian Renaissance art
• Domestic Interior
• Material Culture

• Political sociology
• Quantitative methodology
• Social change
• Social stratification

• Economic Sociology
• Inequality
• Political sociology
• Social policy
• Education
• Healthcare
• Elites

• Community-driven strategies to reduce risk behavior
• Racial/ethnic health disparities
• Tobacco use prevention

My research interests are centered around labor, community organizing, immigration, religion and race.

• Economics of Science and Innovation
• International Economics
• Political Economy

• Queer Theory
• Diaspora
• Environmental Humanities
• Global Asias
• Asian American Studies
• Contemporary Literature

• Eighteenth- and Nineteenth- Century British Literature and Art
• British Romanticism
• Postcolonial, Transnational, and Ethnic Studies
• Islamic and Persian Studies
• Gender and Sexuality Studies

• Creative Writing Pedagogy
• Hybrid Writing
• Improvisation and Writing

• Normal and abnormal neuropsychological development and genetics
• Etiology of learning-language disorders

• Immigration policy
• Deportations
• Mass incarceration
• Human rights
• U.S. Latinos/as
• Latin America

• Mental Health
• Suicidal Behavior
• Substance Abuse
• Epidemiology
• Emergency Department Utilization

• Health disparities
• Social epidemiology/social determinants of health
• Tobacco control
• Oral health
• Latino health
• Immigrant/refugee health

• Economic history
• Labor economics
• Crime
• Housing

• Psychology & Economics
• Experimental Economics
• Game Theory
• Applied Mechanism Design

Social epistemology

Virtue & vice epistemology

Feminist philosophy of language

Ethics & epistemology of the Internet and new media

• Environmental epidemiology
• Perinatal epidemiology
• Maternal and child health
• Valley fever
• Chronic diseases
• Climate change and health

• Attitudes, beliefs, intentions, and motivation
• Behavior change
• Selfregulation and self-control
• Development, integration and application of social psychological theory

• Maternal-child health
• Depression
• Psychoneuroendocrinology
• Childhood obesity
• Social support

• Gender
• Education
• Family
• Sexuality
• Social inequality
• Mixed methods

• Judicial politics
• Interest group involvement in the courts
• Supreme Court precedent
• Public opinion on courts and law
• Elections and voting behavior

• Nineteenth- and 20th-century American and African American literature and culture
• Transnational American studies
• Literature and philosophy
• Søren Kierkegaard
• Global human rights
• Narrative medicine

• History
• American diplomatic history
• Nuclear history
• History of the Cold War

• American politics
• Political behavior
• Political psychology
• Biology and politics

• Public scientific controversies (climate change, vaccines, genetically modified crops, pesticides, chemical safety, race science, etc.)
• Environmental Public Health
• Environmental Justice
• Science Policy
• Feminist Philosophy

• Microeconomics
• Applied econometrics
• Economics of innovation

• Group prejudice
• Morality
• Threat psychology
• Human-robot interaction
• Evolutionary psychology

• Health psychology
• Social psychology
• Self/identity
• Decision-making and behavior
• Responding to bad news

• Anthropological archaeology
• Ethnohistory
• Colonial encounters in the Americas
• Prehistoric demography
• Ancient hunter-gatherer societies of western North America

• Oncology
• Public Health-Health Equity/Disparities
• Healthcare

• Environmental economics
• Law and economics
• Industrial organization
• Agricultural policy and markets
• Finance

• Brain and cognitive development
• Children’s experiences at home and in schools
• Academic readiness and achievement

• Attention
• Perception
• Consciousness
• Action

• Missing data analysis
• Longitudinal data analysis
• Multilevel modeling
• Structural equation modeling
• Mediation and moderation analysis

• First-Year Writing Pedagogy
• Rhetorical Empathy and Rhetorical Listening
• Rhetorical Genre Studies
• Rhetorics of Health and Medicine
• Intersectional Feminism
• Trauma Studies

• Labor Economics
• Public Economics
• American Poverty
• Applied Econometrics

• Environmental Humanities
• Animal Studies
• 19th-21st Latin American and Italian Literatures
• Latin American Dictatorship
• Ecocriticism

• Nineteenth-century British literature and culture
• Cognitive approaches to the study of literature
• Gender and sexuality studies

• Music and dance, especially as they relate to:
• Social power
• National identity
• Gender and sexuality 
• Cultural ownership

• Reading
• Speech
• Neural networks
• Complex systems

• Public Economics
• Labor Economics
• Health Economics

• Economic history
• Economic growth
• Financial economics
• Macroeconomics
• Money and banking

• Continental and humanistic philosophy

• Experiments
• Models of political decision-making
• Strategic cognition and learning in games

• Psychometrics

• Latent variable analysis of social networks
• Structural equation modeling
• Bayesian methods
• Time series and dynamical system analysis
• Categorical data analysis

• • Mesoamerican Glyphic Writing Systems
  • Nahuatl Literature and Translation
  • Mesoamerican Religious Traditions
  • Mesoamerican and Indigenous Science
  • Indigenous Language Revitalization

• Cultural production by and about Latin American authors of Asian descent
• The literary and cultural representations of the relationship between human rights, racialization, gender, migration, and authoritarianism

*Education

*Stratification

*Culture

*Race & Ethnicity

*Asian Americans

*Hmong Americans

• Medical discourse (Spanish in healthcare, intercultural communication)
• Sociolinguistics (code-switching, language attitudes and ideologies)
• Heritage language pedagogy
• Discourse analysis (systemic functional linguistics, Conceptual Metaphor theory)

• Emotional development
• Empathy
• Interpersonal processes
• Conflict management
• Culture

• U.S. diplomatic history
• Nuclear history
• War and morality
• Twentieth century U.S. social movements
• African American history

• Abstract Concepts
• Metaphor & Figurative Thought
• Higher-Level Cognition
• Distributed Cognition
• Cross-Cultural Research
• Culture & Cognition
• Embodied Cognition
• Complex Systems
• Time Series Methods

• African Women and Gender
• 20th Century Intellectual History of African Women
• Inductive Development of Black Feminist Theory
• African Nationalism
• Transnational Black Experiences
• Africa in Classical Antiquity

• Chicano/a/x and Latino/a/x literature
• Film studies
• Literary theory
• Children's literature

• Cognitive science
• Psycholinguistics
• Linguistics
• Semantics
• Metaphor
• Climate communication

• Political Behavior 
• Migration & Diaspora  
• Historical Political Economy 
• Political Rhetoric & Persuasion

• International organizations
• Comparative political institutions
• Human rights

• American political institutions, especially the U.S. Congress — theory and practice of agenda setting and partisanship
• Legislative term limits
• Election administration
• Positive political theory

• Archaeology of religion
• Cave archaeology
• Mesoamerica
• Dynamics of complex society
• Geographic information systems
• Spatial cognition
• Cognitive science affiliate

• Race
• Gender
• Family
• Adoption
• Law

• Computational cognitive neuroscience
• Connectionism
• Cognitive control
• Learning from direct instruction
• Rule-guided behavior
• Concept formation
• Working memory
• Implicit/explicit learning
• Cognitive neuroscience

• Creative Writing (fiction, poetry and creative non-fiction)
• First-Year Composition
• Sound & Audio Storytelling
• Collaborative Storytelling
• Professional Writing
• Anti-racist Pedagogy

• Race and ethnicity 
• Social stratification 
• Social psychology 
• Sociology of health and illness 
• Quantitative methods 
• Comparative sociology 

• Health disparities
• Medical sociology
• Vaccination

• Iran

• Costume design (for theatre, opera, ballet, dance, film and television)
• History of costume design
• History of clothing and fashion, drawing and watercolor painting

Research Interests:

• Communication: Advertising, journalism, public opinion, information overload
• Latinx health
• Cancer and chronic disease prevention
• Obesity

Teaching:

• Medical anthropology: maternal and child health
• Psychological anthropology: emotions and romance
• Gender
• Religion: magic, witchcraft and folk Catholicism
• Folklore
• Latin America, African Diaspora and Africa

• Race/Ethnicity;
• Latina/o/x Sociology;
• Sociology of Education;
• Social Movements;
• Inequality/Mobility;
• Sexualities;

• Iberian Literatures from the 19th to the 21st centuries
• Contemporary Maghribi literature written in European languages
• Subsaharan literature
• Borderland studies
• African migrations to Europe
• 20th century Spanish-American literature

• Latino and immigrant health
• Health policy
• Health equity
• Healthcare access and utilization
• Public health emergencies
• Puerto Rico health system

• Political Behavior
• Citizen-State Relations
• Social Policy
• Bureaucracy and Machine Politics in Latin America

• Contemporary Iberian Culture
• Urban Studies
• Migration Studies
• Gender and Sexuality Studies
• Literature and Trauma
• Affect
• Film
• Poetry

• Race and ethnicity 
• Urban history
• Latina/o history
• Comparative borderlands 
• Social institutions
• Community formation 
• Public policy
• California
• U.S. West

• Cultural Geography
• Historical GIS

• Language Comprehension
• Language Production
• Prediction
• Inference
• Perspective-Taking
• Learning and Memory
• Adaptation
• Executive Function

• African history, especially social history of the 20th century Kenya
• History of development
• Agricultural and rural history
• Decolonization and independence studies

• Applied econometrics
• International finance
• Economic development
• Latin American economies
• Macroeconomics

• Andean bioarchaeology
• paleodietary reconstruction, nutrition, and foodways (stable isotopes)

• Fisheries research
• Experimental economics
• Health economics

• Cognitive development
• Language acquisition
• Psychological reasoning

• Africana theatre and popular culture
• Race, gender, and sexuality
• Black radicalism in the Americas
• Critical ethnography

• Film Theory and Practice
• Mizrahi Studies
• Representations of Border Crossing
• Decolonial Art and Cinema Practices
• Comparative Immigrant and Refugee Studies

• Race
• Immigration
• Labor
• Water
• Food

• Cultural Evolution
• Mathematical and Computational Modeling
• Social Networks
• Complex Systems
• Human Behavioral Ecology
• Social Identity
• Game Theory
• Innovation
• Cooperation
• Norms
• Evolutionary Dynamics

• Latin America
• African Diaspora
• Slavery Studies
• Race
• Gender
• Colonialism

• Tobacco and Cannabis Use
• Community-Partnered Research
• Health Policy and Health Equity
• Psychological Antecedents to Risk Behaviors

• Labor Market Structure
• Immigration
• Discrimination

• Psycholinguistics
• Visual Perception
• Sensorimotor Processing
• Cognitive Science
• Embodied Cognition
• Cognitice Psychology
• Dynamical Systems Theory
• Eye-Tracking

• Political and economic anthropology
• Urban political economy
• Geopolitical borderlands and state-building in border regions
• Cartography and GIS
• Horn of Africa, Somali and Ethiopian diaspora

• Bioarchaeology 
• Mortuary archaeology 
• Identity
• Cultural modifications of the body
• Trauma
• Andes

• Corporate governance and finance
• Tournament theory
• Contract theory
• Economics of information

• Culture and Institutions
• Economic History
• Political Economy
• Gender Economics
• Health Economics

• Intersectionality (race, class and gender)
• Latino/a sociology
• Economic sociology
• Entrepreneurship

• Social movements and hate crime, with an emphasis on how characteristics of the social environment influence levels of collective action
• Social movement tactics and rhetoric
• How political threats inspire social movement coalitions

• citizenship and health
• health inequalities

• Critical race and gender
• Critical refugee studies
• Pedagogy
• Feminist epistemologies
• War and U.S. imperialism
• Hmong American studies
• Southeast Asian and Asian American histories and cultures

• Creative writing
• Interdisciplinarity and creativity studies
• Memory, Language and identity
• Poetry & poetics
• The function & reliability of narrative in internal and external contexts

• Latin America
• Popular music and sound studies
• Music and mobility
• Critical race and post-colonial studies
• Music and violence
• Memory
• Affect

• Quantitative methods for combining research results (meta-analysis)
• Statistical methods for addressing the problem of publication bias

• Health Psychology
• Developmental Psychopathology
• Quality of life during childhood
• Disparities in health and wellbeing in childhood

• 20th century American and Asian art
• American modernism and its global impact
• Asian-American art
• Museum collections and curatorial practices
• Visual culture

• The study of higher education

• Diabetes
• Health
• Pediatric psychology

• Evolutionary genetics
• Taste Perception
• Ethnobotany

• International trade
• Immigration
• Economic growth

• Multilingual writing development and assessment
• Second language acquisition & bilingualism

• Mixture models
• Experimental and quasi-experimental designs
• Medical data
• Social determinant of health

• Neighborhood and place
• Housing
• Education — quality and trajectories
• Structural racism

• Contemporary Japanese art and criticism
• Avant-garde art
• Poststructuralism 
• Posthumanism
• Ecology and aesthetics
• Design

• Philosophy of Cognitive Science
• Phenomenology (especially Husserl)
• Phillosophy of Mind
• Neural Networks
• Dynamical Systems Theory
• Visualization
• Citizen Science and Gamification
• Augmentation Theory

• Immigrant Health
• Immigration Policy
• Immigration Enforcement
• Rural Health
• Community-Engaged Research

• Writing Program administration
• Pedagogy and assessment
• Science and technical writing

• Immigration policy
• Immigration, crime and victimization
• Race, gender, and juvenile and criminal court processing and sanctioning
• Chicano gangs
• Latin American legal systems

• stress and health relationship
• emotional and social well-being
• cardiovascular health
• interventions to improve health