New Social Sciences Faculty
29 scholars are joining us in the 2020-21 academic year!
We’re thrilled to welcome these faculty members to our teaching and research community – to serve as mentors and public intellectuals, path-makers and problem solvers.
You can click each drawer below individually, to see the people who’ve joined that particular department, or you can “expand all” to see all 29 at once.Anthropology
Maria Carolina (Carol) Marchetto
Assistant Professor
Maria Marchetto earned her Ph.D. in microbiology from the University of São Paulo, Brazil in 2005, followed by a five-year postdoctoral fellowship in neurobiology and neuroscience at the Salk Institute in La Jolla. Prior to her appointment at UC San Diego, Marchetto was a staff scientist at Salk, where she led projects that studied neuronal development using human and nonhuman primate stem cells. Her work focuses on using patient-derived induced pluripotent stem cells to study the cellular behavior of human neurons in neuropsychiatric and neurodevelopmental conditions such as Autism Spectrum Disorders. Marchetto’s work is also focused on human evolution in the context of human brain expansion and neuronal development. Her innovative approach uses stem cell models from human and nonhuman primate species to test hypotheses about the role of disruptions to human-specific cellular and molecular signatures in development and their potential impact on mental health. Her work is supported by grants from the National Institutes of Mental Health and private foundations. At UC San Diego, Marchetto will offer undergraduate and graduate courses on using stem cell models to study evolution and neuropsychiatric conditions, the neuroscience of meditation, ethical dilemmas in stem cell research and will develop a graduate seminar on the latest topics in stem cell research, evolution and neuroscience.
Cognitive Science
Jason Fleischer
Assistant Teaching Professor
Jason Fleischer earned his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Manchester (U.K.) in 2004. Previously he was a data scientist at the Salk Institute and a fellow at the Neurosciences Institute. In his research, Fleischer uses machine learning techniques to extract knowledge from complex biological datasets. He has used this approach to study the neural processes underlying behavioral phenomena, such as episodic and working memory. He also has used machine learning to explore relationships between human health and various biomarkers, such as aging and gene expression. Fleischer will teach core undergraduate courses on data science, machine learning and statistical analysis in the Department of Cognitive Science.
Deanna Greene
Assistant Professor
Deanna Greene earned her Ph.D. in psychology with an emphasis in cognitive neuroscience from UCLA in 2010. She was subsequently a postdoctoral fellow at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, where she then became faculty and received a K01 Mentored Research Scientist Career Development Award from the National Institute of Mental Health. Greene’s research focuses on the development of interacting cognitive, motor and sensory systems and the underlying brain network organization supporting this maturation. She implements a variety of cutting-edge MRI and analytic methods to study the typically and atypically developing brain, with particular application to Tourette Syndrome. She will enhance the Department of Cognitive Science’s strengths in developmental cognitive neuroscience and neuroimaging. Greene has won numerous awards and grants for her work, including a NARSAD Young Investigator Award and Tourette Association of America research grant. She is currently the principal investigator for a five-year NIMH R01 grant to study longitudinal changes in brain network organization in children with Tourette syndrome. In addition, Greene is an excellent teacher, earning the Shepherd Ivory Franz Distinguished Teaching Award in Psychology at UCLA. At UC San Diego, she will teach undergraduate and graduate courses on multiple neuroscience topics, including neuroanatomy, neurodevelopment, psychopathology and neuroimaging.
Anastasia Kiyonaga
Assistant Professor
Anastasia Kiyonaga earned her Ph.D. in psychology and neuroscience from Duke University in 2015, after completing an M.S.Ed. in Human Development from the University of Pennsylvania in 2009. Before coming to UC San Diego, she was a postdoctoral scholar in the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute at UC Berkeley, where she was funded by an individual NIH fellowship. Kiyonaga is a cognitive neuroscientist, who studies how humans maintain and use short-term goal information (i.e., “working memory”) in the face of distraction and other demands in the environment. Kiyonaga is well known in her field for innovatively bridging conceptual areas of inquiry and has made a number in influential discoveries about how our mental representations can influence (and be influenced by) our sensory and motor experiences. Her work combines cutting-edge brain imaging and brain stimulation techniques to establish causal relationships between brain activation and behavior. In her first quarter of teaching at UC San Diego, she developed a new undergraduate neuroimaging seminar and taught a large introductory neurobiology course. She garnered enthusiastic and exceptional course reviews, and will continue to teach graduate and undergraduate courses in cognitive neuroscience.
Marcelo G. Mattar
Assistant Professor
Marcelo G. Mattar earned his Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Pennsylvania in 2016. He was subsequently a postdoctoral researcher at Princeton University and a Newton International Fellow at University of Cambridge. Mattar studies learning and decision-making using a combination of theoretical and human behavioral/neuroimaging approaches, with a particular interest in reinforcement learning and Bayesian inference. At UC San Diego, he will teach courses in machine learning, reinforcement learning and computational cognitive neuroscience.
Haijun Xia
Assistant Professor
Haijun Xia earned his Ph.D. in human-computer interaction from the DGP Lab at the Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto. Xia's research area is human-computer interaction, in which he focuses on augmenting our productivity and creativity. He approaches this through the development of the Human-Centered Interaction Language. Its cornerstone is the Human-Centered Representation, which directly reflects and dynamically adapts to our mental processes, as well as affords Human-Centered Articulation through which we can fluidly express our thoughts to digital devices.
Communication
R. Stuart Geiger
Assistant Professor
Stuart Geiger joined the Department of Communication in July 2020 and holds a joint appointment in the Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute, with an affiliation in the Institute for Practical Ethics. In December 2015, he earned his Ph.D. in information management and systems with a designated emphasis in new media from UC Berkeley. From 2016 to 2020, he was a staff ethnographer at the Berkeley Institute for Data Science, first as a postdoctoral scholar, then as a professional researcher and principal investigator. His work investigates the social, cultural, and political-economic aspects of data science, automation and artificial intelligence (AI), including in the areas of online content moderation and scientific research. He has examined the labor of developing and maintaining these technologies, how values and biases are embedded in them, how communities make decisions about how to use or not use them, and how they can be made more transparent, participatory, accountable and contestable. Geiger also studies the development of data science as an academic and professional field, as well as develops interdisciplinary mixed methods. Geiger will teach courses on the social, cultural and political-economic aspects of data science and AI from a social scientific and humanities perspective, as well as courses that will help prepare data science and engineering students for the many issues they will face in developing these kinds of systems across many contexts.
Lillian Walkover
Associate Teaching Professor
Lillian Walkover earned her Ph.D. in sociology from UC San Francisco in 2018. During this time, she received funding from the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowships Program (NSF GRFP) and Graduate Research Opportunities Worldwide (GROW) in partnership with USAID. From 2018 to 2020, she was a postdoctoral fellow in global health at Drexel University in the Department of Sociology. Walkover’s research focuses on the production and movement of global health knowledge. Her dissertation, which she is developing as a book manuscript, is an exploration of the translation and adaptation of “Where There Is No Doctor,” the most widely used community health manual in the world. As a member of the interdisciplinary Structural Competency Working Group, she has developed and led trainings for health practitioners to recognize and respond to social structures as determinants of health and illness, mentored new trainers and co-authored publications. Walkover has experience teaching at UCSF and Mills College. At UC San Diego, she will be teaching and developing a range of Communication courses for undergraduate and Ph.D. students, including “Community Fieldwork,” as well as Global Health courses for undergraduate and master’s students, including “Global Health and Cultural Diversity.” She will also develop courses designed for students interested in the intersection between Communication and Global Health.
Economics
David Arnold
Assistant Teaching Professor
David Arnold earned his Ph.D. in economics from Princeton University in 2020. While there, he received multiple graduate student fellowships, including the Woodrow Wilson Scholars Fellowship as well as the Richard A. Lester Award. His primary research interests are in labor economics and discrimination. His dissertation examined how consolidation impacts labor markets by lowering competition for workers. In related work, he has studied how privatization of state-owned enterprises leads to substantial layoffs and large reductions in wages. He has also co-authored two papers studying how discrimination in bail setting results in Black defendants being more likely to be detained prior to trial than similar white defendants. Arnold received excellent student evaluations and is anticipated to be an effective teacher. He will contribute to a graduate labor economics course as well as teach undergraduate courses in econometrics. In particular, he will develop a course aimed at providing students a hands-on approach to using data in social science.
Fabian Eckert
Assistant Professor
Fabian Eckert joined the Department of Economics in July 2020. He earned his Ph.D. in Economics from Yale University and received the Yale University George Trimis Dissertation Prize. Eckert is interested in economic growth and spatial economics. He studies the forces that shape the spatial distribution of economic activity within countries and how it changes over time. He is particularly interested in exploring the nexus between the rise in economic inequality and changes in the economic geography of the United States. A talented teacher, he was the recipient of the Raymond Powell Prize for Outstanding Graduate Teaching for his work as a teaching assistant at Yale. He also taught math camp for first-year Ph.D. students. At UC San Diego, he will teach a graduate class on spatial economics, a new field that is bringing together tools and insights from international economics, urban economics and regional studies. He is also designing an undergraduate class on "Cities, Migration and the Rise in Economic Inequality.”
Sara Lowes
Assistant Professor
Sara Lowes joined the Department of Economics at UC San Diego in July 2020. She earned her Ph.D. in political economy and government from Harvard University in 2017. Prior to joining UC San Diego, Lowes was an assistant professor of economics at Bocconi University and a postdoctoral fellow at the King Center on Global Development at Stanford University. Her main focus of research is development economics. She is a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a CIFAR Azrieli Global Scholar. Her primary research interests are at the intersection of development economics, economic history and political economy. She examines how culture and institutions shape development outcomes. Much of her work focuses on sub-Saharan Africa. Lowes will teach courses in development economics and comparative historical development.
Denis Shishkin
Assistant Professor
Denis Shishkin earned his Ph.D. in Economics from Princeton University in 2020. His primary research interests are information economics, behavioral economics and experimental economics. His dissertation examines how information is transmitted, elicited and processed by agents in various economic environments. In his research, Shishkin utilizes theoretical models, as well as data collected through incentivized laboratory experiments. Several of his co-authored papers are under review at top economic journals. Having received consistently high evaluations as a teaching assistant at Princeton University, he will teach undergraduate classes in microeconomics and graduate classes in advanced microeconomic theory at UC San Diego.
Fabian Trottner
Assistant Professor
Fabian Trottner joined the Department of Economics in July 2020. He earned his Ph.D. in economics from Princeton University in September 2020, and is a former fellow of the German National Scholarship Foundation. His primary interests are international economics, macroeconomics and labor economics. Much of his research combines economic theory with novel data on firms to quantify the effects of international trade on wages, economic growth and structural change. For Germany, he analyzes how trade liberalization affects earnings outcomes and innovation activities within firms. For the US, he investigates how globalization affects the creation of jobs and labor demand for skilled relative to less-skilled workers in manufacturing industries. In other work, Trottner conducts cutting-edge inter-disciplinary research with computer scientists that aims to improve the economic efficiency of distributed payment systems (e.g., Bitcoin). A highly rated instructor, he will teach graduate and undergraduate courses in international trade and macroeconomics.
Emanuel Vespa
Associate Professor
Emanuel Vespa earned his Ph.D. in economics from New York University in 2012. He was an assistant professor at UC Santa Barbara prior to joining UC San Diego. His primary interests are in experimental and behavioral economics and his appointment will strengthen UC San Diego’s standing in these fields. A first area of his research explores the connection between difficulties with contingent reasoning and decision-making in economics. Contingent reasoning is a type of cognitive sophistication widely assumed in economic models in which individuals need to make informational inferences from hypothetical events. His work has documented that failures in contingent reasoning can explain many well-known discrepancies between observed behavior and theoretical predictions in economics. A second area of research focuses on understanding behavior in a class of games for which theoretical work does not produce clear predictions. More specifically, the theory predicts that many different types of behavior might be observed. Applied economists, who use these games to model economic problems, need to make strong assumptions to make predictions with little guidance. Vespa has designed laboratory experiments that help produce empirical criteria to determine which assumptions are more reliable. His research in this area has received support from the National Science Foundation. At UC Santa Barbara he received an Outstanding Graduate Student Mentor Award and at UC San Diego he will mentor students in his areas of research. He is expected to teach graduate and undergraduate courses in experimental and behavioral economics.
Education Studies
Maria José Aragon
Assistant Professor
María José Aragón earned her Ph.D. in education with emphases in applied linguistics and language, interaction and social organization from UC Santa Barbara in 2018. Prior to coming to UC San Diego, Aragón was previously the director of instruction for the SKILLS (School Kids Investigating Language in Life and Society) Program, a social justice-oriented university-community partnership at UC Santa Barbara. As a teacher educator, she has taught courses on bilingual education and dual language learners at California State Polytechnic University, San Luis Obispo, and California State University, Channel Islands. Her interdisciplinary research examines language and literacy practices in K-12 settings with a focus on how emergent bilinguals and students from minoritized backgrounds employ their linguistic and cultural resources to learn and engage with others. Aragón will teach a mix of undergraduate and graduate courses focused in bilingualism, translanguaging, discourse analysis, culture, race and ethnicity, communication and language, and linguistics; thus allowing the EDS to expand and offer new courses.
Ethnic Studies
Kianna M. Middleton
Assistant Professor
Kianna Middleton earned her Ph.D. in African American studies with a designated emphasis in women, gender and sexuality from UC Berkeley in 2019. She was subsequently the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow for the John E. Sawyer Seminar titled “Chronic Conditions: Knowing, Seeing, and Healing the Body in Global Africa” at the University of Kansas, Lawrence for the 2019-2020 academic term. During her postdoctoral fellowship, Middleton was also a recipient of the 2020 Friedman Feminist Press Collection research grant at Colorado State University. Middleton was a 2018 John Money Fellow for Scholars of Sexuality at the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction at Indiana University, Bloomington, a UC Chancellor’s Fellow for Graduate Study from 2012-2015 and a 2019 UC Dissertation-Year Fellow at UC Berkeley. Her main area of research focuses on literary and medical representations of race, disability, and intersex/disorders of sexual development in the United States from the 1940s to the present. At UC San Diego, Middleton will further develop a Black feminist reading of science that challenges implicit bias, structural racism and ableism at the core of U.S. medical practice. Additionally, she will collaborate on the Department of Ethnic Studies’ creation of a pre-med minor for undergraduates, wherein her interdisciplinary approach to race and medicine will aid in the development of a social justice-based medical curricula. Middleton will teach core Ethnic Studies undergraduate courses in African American studies, medicine and disability, and will offer graduate courses in feminist science studies, queer and sexuality studies, and pedagogy.
Holly Okonkwo
Assistant Professor
Holly Okonkwo will join the Department of Ethnic Studies and the Critical Gender Studies Program in July 2021. She earned her Ph.D. in anthropology from UC Riverside in 2015, followed by a two-year postdoctoral fellowship in the Interdisciplinary Research Institute for the Study of (in)Equality at the University of Denver. In 2017, Okonkwo was awarded a two-year National Science Foundation Research Fellowship award. During the 2020-21 academic year, she will be an American Association of University Women fellow at Claremont Graduate University. Prior to her appointment at UC San Diego, she was an assistant professor at Purdue University. In her work, Okonkwo investigates how knowledge production and technical practices are culturally constructed and conditioned by the politics of race, gender, class and coloniality in the United States, Ghana and Nigeria. This research centers the experiential knowledge of women computer scientists and technologists from the African Diaspora and directly engages with dominant narratives about technology. A highly rated instructor, Okonkwo will teach undergraduate and graduate courses on technology and culture and will develop specialty courses on feminist science studies.
Political Science
Samuel Elgin
Assistant Teaching Professor
Samuel Elgin earned his Ph.D. in philosophy from Yale University in 2018, followed by a post‐doctoral appointment at UC San Diego. He specializes in foundational metaphysics and its implications for other fields. In particular, he studies modality, morality and the conditions under which a philosophical account is correct. He has published in the Journal of Philosophical Logic, Synthese, Erkenntnis, and Ethical Theory and Moral Practice. Elgin will teach courses on ethics and society and critical reasoning.
Michael Joseph
Assistant Professor
Michael Joseph earned his Ph.D. in political science from George Washington University in 2018, followed by a prestigious post‐doctoral appointment at Yale University. He specializes in international security, with a focus on diplomatic communication. Joseph’s research advances our understanding of important issues such crisis bargaining, the impact of modern media on foreign policy, cross-domain signaling, and the interaction between the needs for secrecy and transparency in negotiation and covert operation situations. He has already published articles in two of the best subfield journals for international relations research (the Journal of Conflict Resolution and the Journal of Peace Research). Joseph will teach at the undergraduate and graduate levels in international relations, including specialized courses on conflict and cooperation, diplomatic communication and negotiations, and intelligence analysis.
Zeynep Pamuk
Assistant Professor
Zeynep Pamuk earned her Ph.D. in government from Harvard University in 2017, followed by a prestigious fellowship at Oxford University. Her research develops normative criteria for thinking about the incorporation of technical and scientific expertise in democratic decision-making. This innovative research has already earned her a solo-authored publication in one of the field’s top 10 journals, British Journal of Political Science, and the British Academy Brian Barry Prize. Given her expertise, Pamuk is prepared to contribute to several campus units beyond Political Science, including the Institute for Practical Ethics and the Halicioglu Data Science Institute. Pamuk will teach at the undergraduate and graduate levels in political theory and data analytics, including specialized courses on ethics, public policy, and democratic values.
Psychology
E. Nathaniel Chapman
Assistant Teaching Professor
Nathaniel Chapman earned his Psy.D. in clinical psychology from the Carlos Albizu University in 2017. He was an assistant professor, interim department chairperson of social sciences, and interim associate dean of academic affairs at Miami Dade College, and an assistant professor at State University of New York-Canton and Marshall University of West Virginia before his appointment at UC San Diego. Chapman has broad experience treating various populations, including spinal cord injuries, substance abuse patients, veterans and adolescents and children. He specializes in couple’s therapy utilizing the empirically supported Gottman Method treatment. Chapman was awarded the Service Learning Faculty of Year award at Miami Dade College in 2013 for innovations connecting curriculum to the community. A highly regarded practical instructor, Chapman will be developing co-curricular community outreach programming for our undergraduates interested in clinical psychology.
Janna Dickenson
Assistant Teaching Professor
Janna Dickenson earned her Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the University of Utah in 2017, after completing an internship at VA Boston Healthcare System. She was the first scholar to be awarded the Doug Braun Harvey Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Program of Human Sexuality at the University of Minnesota. Prior to her appointment at UC San Diego, she was an assistant professor at California Institute of Integral Studies. Dickenson’s research, advocacy and clinical work focus on gender and sexual health and well-being. Her research examines, and often counters, common misconceptions about sexuality and investigates how social and biological factors interact to shape subjective sexual responses among sexually and gender diverse populations. Dickenson has been recognized for leveraging her expertise to prevent non-consensual sexual interactions, promote gender inclusivity in STEM fields, and identify and address organizational policies that adversely impact transgender and LGBQ+ populations. She maintains a consistent record of teaching excellence and has enjoyed mentoring students, supervising medical residents and teaching various graduate and undergraduate courses in gender, sexuality and clinical science. She will teach undergraduate courses in clinical psychology, gender and sexuality, and biological foundations of psychology. She looks forward to developing ways to enhance accessibility to sexual health information and promote training in sexual health and well-being at UC San Diego.
Lindsey J. Powell
Assistant Professor
Lindsey Powell earned her Ph.D. in psychology from Harvard University in 2012. She completed postdoctoral training both at Harvard and at MIT, where she was awarded a research fellowship from the Simons Center for the Social Brain. Powell’s research focuses on social and cognitive development in infancy an early childhood. She uses behavioral and neuroimaging methods to study how humans develop the capacities to engage in and learn from social interactions. Her research brings expertise in functional near-infrared spectroscopy, a new neuroimaging method for the Department of Psychology at UC San Diego, and adds a new dimension to the developmental area’s focus on understanding young humans’ uniquely powerful learning abilities. As a graduate student, Powell was honored by Harvard University for excellence in undergraduate teaching. At UC San Diego, she has already taught a highly rated undergraduate course in developmental psychology and will teach specialized undergraduate and graduate courses on the origins of cognition and on social and cultural learning.
Sociology
Michel Estefan
Assistant Teaching Professor
Michel Estefan earned his M.A. and Ph.D. in sociology from UC Berkeley. He is a political sociologist who studies the rule of law from a comparative and historical perspective and a committed teacher with a practice and research focus on inclusive and equitable pedagogy. His first book, “Feeling Like Equals: A Gramscian Reading of the Historical Origins and Development of Human Rights,” was published in Spanish by Universidad Iberoamericana Press (2015). His current work in political sociology uses the empirical cases of twentieth century Spain and Mexico to unearth the authoritarian foundations of the rule of law.
Richard Pitt
Associate Professor
Richard Pitt earned his M.Ed. (counselor education) from Penn State University and an M.A. and Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Arizona. His research primarily contributes to two sub-disciplines: sociology of religion and sociology of education. Within these broad fields of inquiry, his work tends to focus on social identity, race and ethnicity, and gender and sexuality. A sociological social psychologist by training, his methodological toolkit includes everything from qualitative content analysis, interviews and focus groups to the quantitative analysis of both his own large surveys and pre-existing datasets. Pitt’s main focus is on the social construction and maintenance of social identity, particularly the intersection of social group identities (gender, race, sexuality) and religious, academic and professional identities.
Pitt’s web pageUrban Studies and Planning
Lawrence D. Frank
Professor
Lawrence Frank specializes in the interaction between land use, travel behavior, air quality and health, and in the energy use and climate change impacts of urban form policies. He is a “walkability pioneer” and was among the very first to quantify connections between built environment and active transportation. He coined the term “walkability” in the early ’90s; his work led to WalkScore and has been cited more than 34,000 times. He has been listed in Thompson and Reuter’s top 1% in the social sciences since 2014 and is among the few most cited planning academics globally. Frank has published more than 160 peer reviewed articles and co-authored Heath and Community Design and Urban Sprawl and Public Health, mapping out the field emerging at the nexus between built and natural environments and health. Frank has led more than $20 million in primary research and consults with government agencies, NGOs and decision-makers supporting their ability to predict travel, GHG, chronic disease and economic impacts of land use and transportation policies.
Amy M. Lerner
Associate Teaching Professor
Amy Lerner earned her Ph.D. in geography in 2011 from UC Santa Barbara. Subsequently she was a postdoctoral research associate at Rutgers University, in the departments of Geography and Human Ecology (2011-2013) and at the Princeton University School of Public and International Affairs (2013-2015). She has extensive teaching experience, ranging from Latin American geography and world geography to the urban ecology of New York City. Lerner was an assistant professor in the National Laboratory for Sustainable Science in the Ecology Institute of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, UNAM, Mexico City from 2015 to 2020, where she taught courses on sustainability science, transdisciplinary research methods, and global environmental change. In Mexico City, she led several research projects related to city-university partnerships, the persistence of peri-urban agriculture, and capacity-building in the local city government for risk management and resilience. Lerner’s research focuses on processes of landscape change and especially on the rural-urban frontier, sustainable aspects of city planning, including resilience, green infrastructure, and urban and peri-urban agriculture, and the science-policy interface. Her coursework will include topics related to people-place relationships, sustainable cities, urban ecology, and transdisciplinary research and education.
Mirle D. Rabinowitz Bussell
Associate Teaching Professor
Mirle Rabinowitz Bussell earned her Ph.D. in urban planning from UCLA in 1999. She has been a part of UC San Diego’s campus community for many years, and, prior to her new appointment, she held a combined position as a continuing lecturer and academic coordinator in the Urban Studies and Planning Department. Her primary research interests include the relationship between private foundations engaged in community development and the underserved communities targeted for change, affordable housing and homelessness policy, and healthy aging and the built environment. She focuses on applied research that bridges theory and practice and has cultivated research collaborations with numerous organizations across the San Diego region. Prior to her academic career, she worked for a nonprofit affordable housing developer in upstate New York. Bussell is dedicated to undergraduate education, particularly community engaged experiential learning, and is the founding academic director for USP’s new undergraduate degree in real estate and development. She is also a recipient of UC San Diego’s Barbara F. and Paul D. Saltman Distinguished Teaching Award for Non-Senate Faculty. She will continue to teach undergraduate foundation courses for USP along with an innovative practicum course that she co-developed with a colleague focusing on homelessness in San Diego.
Manuel Shvartzberg Carrió
Assistant Professor
Manuel Shvartzberg Carrió joined the Department of Urban Studies and Planning in July 2020 as an executive vice chancellor’s Target of Excellence appointment. Prior to UC San Diego, Shvartzberg Carrió was an assistant professor in the History of Architecture and Urban Development Program at Cornell University. He earned a Ph.D. in architecture history and theory from Columbia University in 2019, with a dissertation on the history of modern architecture in relation to settler colonialism, honored as the finalist of the Graham Foundation’s Carter Manny Award (Citation of Special Recognition). At Columbia, Shvartzberg Carrió was also a graduate fellow at the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, and the lead coordinator and teacher for the MSc Thesis in the Critical, Curatorial, and Conceptual Practices in Architecture program. He has taught design, history and theory at various other institutions, including the California Institute of the Arts and the University of Southern California. Shvartzberg Carrió holds a post-graduate diploma in architecture (M.Arch. equivalent) from University College London; a post-graduate diploma (with distinction) in professional practice in architecture from Westminster University; and a master’s in aesthetics and politics from the California Institute of the Arts. As a practicing architect, he worked for OMA/Rem Koolhaas in Rotterdam; with Barozzi/Veiga in Barcelona; and was project architect for David Chipperfield Architects in London, where he led the design and construction of projects internationally. In 2018-19, he was a Mellon Fellow in Egalitarianism and the Metropolis at the University of Michigan, and was awarded a 2019 fellowship at USC’s Society of Fellows in the Humanities (declined). Shvartzberg Carrió’s teaching and research within the Department of Urban Studies and Planning focuses on histories and theories of architecture and geopolitics, particularly how architectural technologies and territorial infrastructures mediate regimes of settler colonial violence, racial capitalism and decolonial futures.