DR. MYLES ALI
Assistant Professor
Myles Ali is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Merced. He is a historian of Africa, who focuses on the history of slavery, emancipation, trade, and colonialism in British Sierra Leone in West Africa. Myles received his PhD in History at York University, and he is a former University of California Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow and recipient of an American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship. He is currently working on his first book manuscript, Captive Lives: Experiences of Slavery and Freedom in Colonial Sierra Leone.
Professor of History
DR. CHRITSITNA BAKER
Associate Professor of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies
I’m an Associate Professor of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies. My interests center on the social construction and ideologies of race and gender, with an emphasis on Black feminist theory and praxis, media representations of Blackness, and experiences of women of color in film/media, higher education, and other social institutions. I’m the author of Contemporary Black Women Filmmakers and the Art of Resistance (The Ohio State University Press),the edited collection Kasi Lemmons: Interviews (University Press of Mississippi), as well as several articles.
DR. KEVIN DAWSON
Associate Professor of History
Kevin Dawson is a historian of the African diaspora at the University of California, Merced.His scholarship considers how enslaved Africans recreated and reimagined Atlantic African aquatic traditions in the Americas, including swimming, underwater diving, surfing, canoe-making, and canoeing. He has published numerous articles and his book, Undercurrents of Power: Aquatic Culture in the African Diaspora, (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), was awarded the 2019 Harriet Tubman Prize form the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library.
DR. SAPANA DOSHI
Associate Professor and Chair of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies
DR. SEAN MALLOY
Professor of History
My research interests include issues of colonialism, war, white supremacy, and the critical study of Zionism. My early work focused on nuclear history as a way of examining the intersection between science, ethics, and decision making. More recently I have explored the radical internationalism of the Black Panther Party (BPP) and its relationship to the Third World, the Cold War, and neoliberal globalization. My current book project, tenatively entitled "The Iron Wall and the Ivory Tower: The Zionist War on Higher Education," is a critical analysis of the countermobilization against Palestinian solidarity on US college campuses.
DR. MARIA MARTIN
Assistant Professor of African History
Dr. Maria Martin is a Black Studies Africanist and women and gender studies scholar. As a Black Studies Africanist she uses her training in Black Studies to inform her research on Africa. Her research centers Nigerian women’s activism and intellectual history. She is also concerned with viewing Africa as a site of theoretical development where African cultures, philosophies, and cosmologies can be used to generate theories that can be used broadly. Her other interests are gendering African nationalism, transnational Black experiences, Black consciousness in Africa and the Diaspora, and ancient Africa. She is a Bill and Melinda Gates Scholarship alumna and has won several prestigious Fulbright awards in addition to receiving an honorable mention from the Ford Foundation for her research. She was also invited as a panelist for the 65th session of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women in 2021. Dr. Martin also mentors academics in the US and internationally. In addition, to give back to communities where she gathers data, she co-founded an NGO to support students in Nigeria.
DR. KIT MYERS
Assistant Professor of History | Critical Race and Ethnic Studies
Kit Myers is an assistant professor in the Department of History & Critical Race and Ethnic Studies. He was previously a Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Merced. His teaching interests include the study of race as a social, relational, and intersectional category of difference and power. His forthcoming book, The Violence of Love: Race, Adoption, and Family in the United States, with University of California Press (2025), comparatively examines the transracial and transnational adoption of Asian, Black, and Native American children by White families to understand how race has been constructed relationally to mark certain homes, families, and nations as spaces of love, freedom, and better futures against others that not. Myers has also published journal articles in Adoption Quarterly, Critical Discourse Studies, Adoption & Culture, and Amerasia. He serves as on the executive committee for the Alliance for the Study of Adoption and Culture. He received his Ph.D. and M.A. from the University of California, San Diego in ethnic studies and his B.S. in ethnic studies and journalism from the University of Oregon.
DR. SHOLEH QUINN
Professor of History
Sholeh Quinn is Professor of History in the department of History & Critical Race and Ethnic Studies. Her research focuses on the history and historiography of early modern Iran and the Persianate world. She is the author of Historical Writing during the Reign of Shah ‘Abbas: Ideology, Imitation, and Legitimacy in Safavid Chronicles (2000), Shah Abbas: the King Who Refashioned Iran (2015), and co-editor of History and Historiography of Post-Mongol Central Asia and the Middle East: Studies in Honor of John E. Woods (2006). Her most recent book is Persian Historiography across Empire: the Ottomans, Safavids, and Mughals (Cambridge University Press, 2021).
DR. MA VANG
Assistant Professor of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies
DR. MUEY SAETEURN
Associate Professor of History
Muey Saeteurn specializes in the history of decolonization, nation-building, socio-economic development, and agrarian change in twentieth-century Kenya and the world. The thread that runs through her research and the courses she teaches concerns the ways in which rural African women and men shaped large-scale historical processes while positioning themselves as central actors in the making of the modern globalized world. Her first book, Cultivating Their Own: Agriculture in Western Kenya During the “Development” Era, was published in 2020 with the Rochester Studies in African History and the Diaspora series at the University of Rochester Press. Her current book project is titled Custodians of Tea: A History of Kenya's Tea Producers in the Late Cold War Era.
DR. NICOSIA SHAKES
Assistant Professor of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies
Nicosia Shakes is a scholar and artist specializing in African Diasporic political activism, race, gender and sexuality, and theatre and performance. Her book is titled, Women’s Activist Theatre in Jamaica and South Africa: Gender, Race, and Performance Space. It won the National Women’s Studies Association/University of Illinois Press First Book Prize in 2017 and was published by UIP in 2023. The book examines the critical interventions made by theatre projects formed and operated by African and African-descended women. Through performance, these groups theorize about racial, gender and economic justice in Jamaica and South Africa.
DR. MARIO SIFUENTEZ
Associate Professor of History
DR. SABRINA SMITH
Assistant Professor of Latin American History
Sabrina Smith specializes in the history of the African Diaspora to Mexico and Central America. Her research and teaching examines the everyday experiences of African-descended people, and particularly women, in Latin America. She is currently working on her first book manuscript on African-descended women and men in colonial Oaxaca
DR. DAVID ROUFF
Associate Professor and Chair, Department of History & Critical Race and Ethnic Studies Grey Roberts and Bette Woolstenhulme Presidential Chair in History
Professor Rouff joined the UC Merced Faculty in 2012, and I am delighted to be part of the ongoing adventure of building UC Merced. He studies the intersection of people, policy, and place in the North American West from the seventeenth through twentieth centuries. His current project, “Emerging from the Rubble: Chinese in Merced, California,” harnesses local archives to reconstruct and re-people the American Chinese community in Merced during the late nineteenth century. The project explores how Chinese immigrants’ land use, gardens, and urban design facilitated the development of a vital transnational community. He also wrote Before L.A.: Race, Space, and Municipal Power in Los Angeles, 1781–1895 (2013). He served on the Los Angeles Civic Memory Working Group which produced Past Due (civicmemory.la) and has been a fellow at the Henry E. Huntington Library. His classes include U.S. Film and History: Hollywood USA, Life and Death in the Old West, and California History as US History. When not teaching, researching, writing, and answering emails, Professor Rouff enjoys gardening and cooking the food he grows. He invites you to reach out with any questions about the History major, the department, or any of his classes.
DR. TOMMY TRAN
Lecturer of History | Critical Race and Ethnic Studies
I am a Continuing Lecturer of History and the sole East Asian specialist in HCRES. My prior research has involved urbanization and the impact of greater Pacific Rim tourism in South Korea from 1961 to the present, but my interests are relatively broad as I also have begun exploring cross-Pacific exchanges in Hawai'i and California. As an instructor, I have pushed for expanding our Asia-Pacific and API-American studies representation at UC Merced and thus offer a wide variety courses in the histories and cultures of China, Korea, and Japan.
DR. GREGG HERKEN
Professor of History (Emeritus)
Postdoctoral Fellows
| DR. VIVIANA QUINETERO MARQUES | |
| UC President's and an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of History, Critical Race, and Ethnic Studies at UC Merced. |
