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Core Faculty

  • Holly Okonkwo

    Holly Okonkwo

    Assistant Professor, Ethnic Studies & CGS

    Email: hokonkwo@ucsd.edu
    Office Location: SSB 224

    Winter Quarter 2025
    CGS 135. Feminist Science and Technology Studies

    Spring Quarter 2025
    CGS 147. Black Feminisms, Past and Present
    CGS 200. Advanced Studies in Critical Gender Studies

    Research Interests and Education 
    Dr. Okonkwo joined 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 was 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 249

    Winter Quarter 2025
    CGS 299. Advanced Practicum in Critical Gender Studies

    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.

     
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    Deepti Chatti

    Assistant Professor, Urban Studies and Planning & CGS

    Email: dchatti@ucsd.edu
    Office Location: RWAC (PEB) 328

    Fall Quarter 2024
    CGS 134. Gender and Climate Justice

    Winter Quarter 2025
    CGS 136. Gender, Tech, and Development

    Research Interests and Education
    Deepti Chatti, PhD, PE, LEED AP is an Assistant Professor of Climate Justice in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning, core faculty in the Critical Gender Studies Program, and affiliate faculty with the South Asia Initiative at the University of California San Diego. 

    An engineer turned ethnographer, Dr. Chatti draws on her interdisciplinary training in the social sciences, humanities, natural sciences, and engineering to study urgent socio-environmental questions related to sustainable development, energy access, climate change, and gender justice. A collaborative and engaged scholar, Dr. Chatti partners with community-based organizations in India and the United States to carry out her research. 

    Her scholarship and writing appear in Environment and Society: Advances in Research, Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, Energy Research and Social Science, Brown Journal of World Affairs, the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Anthropology, in several edited volumes, and in other venues. For a more complete list of publications, please visit her website. 

    She is currently working on a book manuscript about energy access, air pollution, and climate justice in India based on long-term multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork.

    Her research has been enabled by support from the Strategic Growth Council of California, the Sustainable Energy Transitions Initiative, the McCrone Promising Faculty Scholars Award at Cal Poly Humboldt, the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale University, the South Asian Studies Council at Yale, the Tropical Resources Initiative at Yale, the Yale Institute for Biospheric Research, the Yale School of the Environment, and the US Environmental Protection Agency.