People

Executive Director and Lead Researcher Dr. Lawrence Rosenthal is Executive Director and Lead Researcher of the Berkeley Center for Right-Wing Studies. He was a Visiting Scholar at the Institute for the Study of Social Change for a dozen years before founding the Center in 2009. He has taught at UC Berkeley in the Sociology and Italian Studies Departments and was a Fulbright Professor at the University of Naples in Italy.  He has studied the Right in the United States and in Italy and is currently working on a study of the contemporary American Right in comparison to movements of the Right in 20th century Europe. email: larose@berkeley.edu

Program Director Dr. Christine Trost is Program Director of the Berkeley Center for Right-Wing Studies. She also serves as Associate Director of the Institute for the Study of Societal Issues (ISSI). In her role as Program Director of the Center, Trost develops new research initiatives related to the study of right-wing movements, organizes conferences and events, coordinates the mini-grants program, and directs the second-year of the Graduate Fellows Training Program. Currently, she is co-editing with Larry Rosenthal a book on the Tea Party movement.  Trost earned her Ph.D. in Political Science from UC Berkeley and her M.A. in Political Science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She has taught courses on American politics in the Political Science Department at Berkeley and at Mills College. In 2008 she received the Chancellor's Outstanding Staff Award for her work as a member of the Berkeley Initiative for Leadership and Diversity Steering Committee. email: ctrost@berkeley.edu

Visting Scholars in Residence

Ruth Rosen, Professor Emerita of History, UC Davis

Jennifer Johnson, Associate Professor of Sociology, Kenyon College

Faculty Advisory Board Members

Michael Omi, Chair, Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies, UC Berkeley

Paola Bacchetta, Associate Professor of Gender and Women's Studies, and Chair of the Beatrice Bain Research Group, UC Berkeley

Troy Duster, Chancellor's Professor, UC Berkeley and Professor of Sociology, New York University

William Russell Ellis, Professor Emeritus of Architecture, UC Berkeley 

Hardy Frye, Professor Emeritus of Sociology, UC Santa Cruz

Carole Joffe, Professor Emerita of Sociology, UC Davis, and Professor, Bixby Center for Global Reproductive Health, UCSF

Kim Voss, Professor of Sociology, UC Berkeley

Affiliated Scholars

Bob Blauner, Professor Emeritus of Sociology, UC Berkeley

J. Bradford DeLong, Professor of Economics, UC Berkeley

Corey Fields, Assistant Professor of Sociology, Stanford University

Minoo Moallem, Professor of Gender and Women's Studies, UC Berkeley

AlSayyad Nezar, Professor of Architecture, City Planning, Urban Design, and Urban History, UC Berkeley

Dylan Riley, Assistant Professor of Sociology, UC Berkeley

Vesna Rodic, Lecturer, French Department, UC Berkeley

Tamara Lea Spira, University of California President's Postdoctoral Fellow, Departments of Spanish and Cultural Studies, UC Davis

Alan Tansman, Professor and Chair of East Asian Languages and Cultures Department, UC Berkeley

Cihan Tugal Assistant Professor of Sociology, UC Berkeley

Priya Venkatesan, Lecturer, Santa Clara University, Department of English

Jason Wittenberg, Assistant Professor of Political Science, UC Berkeley

Ariana Zambiras, Fulbright Scholar, Sociology, UC Berkeley

Graduate Student Researchers

Matt Horton, Doctoral Student, Graduate School of Education, UC Berkeley

Graduate Fellows

Alina Polyakova, Doctoral Candidate, Sociology, UC Berkeley

Alina Polyakova is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology. Her dissertation seeks to explain the success and failure of right-wing parties in Europe. Taking a broad comparative perspective, Alina's work asks why right-wing parties in post-communist Central and Eastern Europe have not been as electorally successful as their West European counterparts. Examining Ukraine as a case study, her research proposes that the linkages extreme right-wing parties form with civil society organizations are key for understanding their success or failure. (Read a copy of Alina's working paper, "Explaining Support for Radical Right Parties in New Democracies: The Limits of Structural Determinants and the Potentiality of Civil Society," here.)

Sarah Anne Minkin, Doctoral Candidate, Sociology, UC Berkeley

Sarah Anne Minkin is a Ph.D. candidate in the Sociology department. Her research interests include gender, nationalism, diasporas, social movements and the sociology of emotion. Her dissertation research focuses on American Jews' relationships to Israel, looking specifically at the production of collective identity and memory with regard to Israel. Sarah Anne is conducting ethnographic research on how Jewish people of different generations understand, transmit and negotiate their family and ethno-national histories, and how these understandings shape feelings of connection to or distance from Israel. Sarah Anne earned a master's degree in Sociology from UC-Berkeley for her research on gender and militarism as they manifest in the conscientious objection and draft resistance movement in Israel.

2012-13 UC Berkeley Graduate and Undergraduate Student Minigrant Recipients

Mary Hoopes, Doctoral Candidate, Jurisprudence and Social Policy, "Understanding the Emergence & Diffusion of Recent Restrictive State Laws Regulating Immigration"

Heather Melquist, Doctoral Student, Anthropology, "The 'Multisite Church Revolution' in American Evangelicalism"

David Tamayo, Doctoral Student, History, "Voluntary Associations and the Politicization of the Mexican Middle Classes, 1940-60"

Gabriel Schwartzman, Undergraduate, Geography, "From Left to Right: Stories of Political Transition in Appalachia"

2011-12 UC Berkeley Graduate and Undergraduate Student Minigrant Recipients

Angelo Matteo Caglioti, Doctoral Student, History, "Modernizing Fascism: Agricultural Sciences and Mussolini's African Empire"

Christopher Chambers-Ju, Doctoral Candidate, Political Science, "Odd Bedfellows: The Mexican Teachers' Unions Alliance with a Right-Wing Party"

Cyrus Dioun, Doctoral Student, Sociology, "Untangling Religion and Politics: A Network Approach to Theocracy"

Cameron McKee, Undergraduate, History and History of Art, "Visual Anxiety: Deviant Gender and Depictions of the Jewish Male During the Dreyfus Affair"

Gabriel Schwartzman, Undergraduate, Geography, "The Appalachian 'Pro-Coal' Movement

Agnieszka Smelkowska, Undergraduate, History, "Why Fascism Failed in Interwar Poland"

2010-11 UC Berkeley Graduate and Undergraduate Student Minigrant Recipients

Alina Polyakova, Doctoral Candidate, Sociology, "Right-Wing Politics and Civil Society in Post-Communist Democracies"

Nazanin Shahrokni, Doctoral Candidate, "Gender Segregated Space: Traversing the 'Public' in Iran"

David Tamayo, Doctoral Student, History, "The Conservative Right in Urban Mexico"

Andrina Tran, Undergraduate, History, "'Radicals for Capitalism': Ayn Rand and the Conservative Youth Movement of the 1960s"

2009-10 UC Berkeley Graduate and Undergraduate Student Minigrant Recipients

Jackie Bass, Doctoral Candidate, Political Science, "Word of Faith and the African American Community"

Neal Richardson, Doctoral Candidate, Political Science, "The Politics of Abundance: Export Agriculture and Conservative Politics in South America"

Nu-Anh Tran, Doctoral Candidate, History, "Contested Identities: Nationalism in the Republic of Vietnam, 1945-65"

Livier Gutierrez, Undergraduate, Sociology, "The California Minutemen Project Civil Defense Corps"