Faculty Affiliate

William F. Hanks studies the history and ethnography of Yucatan, Mexico, and Yucatec Maya language and culture, including early modern Spain and Spanish as a necessary step towards understanding the colonial formation of Yucatan and New Spain. He examines the organization and dynamics of routine language use (semantics, pragmatics, interactional sociolinguistics and the social foundations of speech practices). He has studied ritual practice, comparative shamanisms, and the relations between religion and health care in rural Mexico. His most recent work concerns the colonial history of...

Dr. Eva Harris is a Professor in the Division of Infectious Diseases and Director of the Center for Global Public Health in the School of Public Health at UC Berkeley. She has developed a multidisciplinary approach to study the molecular virology, pathogenesis, immunology, epidemiology, diagnostics, clinical aspects and control of dengue, Zika and chikungunya, the most prevalent mosquito-borne viral diseases in humans. Her work addresses immune correlates of protection and pathogenesis, viral and host factors that modulate disease severity, and virus replication and evolution, using in...

Christine Hastorf focuses on social life, political change, agricultural production, foodways, and the methodologies that lead to a better understanding of the past through the study of plant-use. She has written on agricultural production, cooking practices and what shifts in these suggest about social relations, gender relations surrounding plant use, the rise of complex society, political change and the symbolic use of plants in the legitimation of authority, fuel use and related symbolism, and plant domestication as part of social identity construction and ritual and social...

Rebecca Herman is an assistant professor in the Department of History. Her research and writing examine modern Latin American history in a global context.

Her first book, forthcoming from Oxford University Press, reconstructs the history of U.S. military basing in Latin America during World War II – weaving together high diplomacy with on-the-ground examinations of race, labor, sex and law in the areas surrounding defense sites – to reveal how World War became a powerful inflection point in the relationship between domestic and international politics in the Americas in the twentieth...