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2023-24 Academic Year Core Faculty

  • Holly Okonkwo

    Holly Okonkwo

    Assistant Professor, Ethnic Studies & CGS

    Email: hokonkwo@ucsd.edu
    Office Location: SSB

    Spring Quarter 2023
    CGS 200: Advanced Studies in CGS

    Research Interests and Education 
    Dr. Okonkwo will join the Department of Ethnic Studies and the Critical Gender Studies Program in July 2021. She received her Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of California, 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, Dr. 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, Dr. 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, Dr. Okonkwo will teach undergraduate and graduate courses on technology and culture and will develop specialty courses on feminist science studies.
  • Roy Pérez

    Roy Pérez

    Assistant Professor, Ethnic Studies & CGS

    Email:  r5perez@ucsd.edu
    Office Location: SSB

    Fall Quarter 2021
    CGS 100A: Conceptualizing Gender - Theories
    CGS 190: Honors Seminar

    Research Interests and Education

    Roy Pérez received his Ph.D. in English from New York University in 2012, after which he joined the faculty of English and American Ethnic Studies at Willamette University, where he served as Chair of the American Ethnic Studies program. Pérez is a 2018 recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities faculty research fellowship, and in 2018-2019 he was an Institute for American Cultures research fellow in the Chicano Studies Research Center at UCLA. His published work and his teaching focus on gender, sexuality, and race in Latinx literary and visual culture, with special attention to cross-cultural collaborations in Latinx writing, performance, and activism. Pérez has received numerous awards for his teaching, and was named the 2014 Mortarboard Professor of the Year at Willamette University. Pérez has partnered with local venues like the Portland Institute of Contemporary Art and the Profile Theatre to develop community programming and to provide opportunities for students to engage directly with cultural institutions. Pérez teaches core undergraduate and graduate courses in ethnic studies and gender studies as well as topics courses in Latinx cultures, and serves as advisor to doctoral students pursuing the interdisciplinary graduate certificate in Critical Gender Studies.