Grad Student - ISSI

Alexandra Gessesse

African American and African Diaspora Studies, UC Berkeley

Alexandra Gessesse is a cultural worker, daughter of the diaspora, and PhD Candidate in the Department of African Diaspora Studies at UC Berkeley. Alexandra’s dissertation examines how Ethiopian and Eritrean immigrants navigate historically Black neighborhoods in the U.S., forging new forms of belonging through the lenses of place, politics, and popular culture. As a visual storyteller, Alexandra uses photography and video to capture the everyday moments where these complex negotiations of identity unfold—revealing how Blackness is performed, contested, and reimagined...

Ritika Goel

Political Science, UC Berkeley

Jeremy Gottlieb

UCSF-UCB Medical Anthropology, UC Berkeley

Jeremy Gottlieb is an MD-PhD student in medical anthropology. They study changing ideas of the human and subjectivity through ethnographic research with neuropsychiatric researchers, clinicians, and those living with Deep Brain Stimulation as a treatment for psychiatric illnesses.

Jesús Gutiérrez

Anthropology, UC Berkeley

Jesús Gutiérrez is a PhD candidate in Anthropology at UC Berkeley. His research, teaching and writing cluster around themes related to mediation, performance and embodiment; religion, ritual, and the secular; and temporality, memory and historical consciousness in Black Atlantic societies. His dissertation analyzes the concepts of fugitivity, ancestrality and multiplicity that are activated and disseminated in Afro-Brazilian aesthetic traditions. His ethnographic research suggests that what is at stake in the cultural politics of certain popular and folk art forms of the...

Sarah Halabe

Ethnic Studies, UC Berkeley

Sarah Halabe is a PhD student in Ethnic Studies, where she studies US Third Worldism, anti-imperial student movements, and leftist Asian American political formations of the late 60s and 70s. Her research specifically looks at the role of Marxist-Leninist-Maoist organizations in the Asian American Political Movement and how these groups were theorizing the national liberation struggles happening throughout the Third World. Sarah was born and raised in the Bay Area and received her B.A. in English and American Studies from Scripps College.

Anissa Hall

Social Welfare, UC Berkeley

Anissa Hall (she/her) is an MSW/PhD student passionate about exploring Black intergenerational trauma, with a focus on how the legacy of U.S. anti-Black racism and oppression, compounded by a severance from Indigenous African ways of knowing, being, and healing, has resulted in a uniquely African American – or Soulaan – experience of intergenerational trauma. Her work also aims to explore the ways this legacy of trauma and institutionalized oppression affects healing across Afro-Diasporic communities. She believes that by interrogating the ways that historical and ongoing...

Sierra Hampton

Environmental Science, Policy, and Management, UC Berkeley

Hasan Henry

Sociology, UC Berkeley

Hasan Henry (he/him) is a PhD student in Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. His research interests lie in issues of racial modernity, Black masculinities and gender, and the sociology of sexuality, situated within an interdisciplinary framing that includes DuBoisian Sociology, Black Studies, and Gender and Sexuality Studies. Hasan's current project concerns the social antecedents to the formation of sexual desire, investigating how contemporary sexual practices, desires, and representations of Black sexuality have been shaped by the colonial encounter and its afterlives—...

Zachary Lorico Hertz

Charles and Louise Travers Department of Political Science, UC Berkeley

Zachary Lorico Hertz is a Ph.D. student in the Charles and Louise Travers Department of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. He is particularly interested in understanding how race and class identity develop, are expressed through political behavior, and intersect with power in local politics. In his research, he uses causal inference methods and survey data to study the effects an increasingly diverse and partisan electorate will have on representation and sub-national institutions. His current project uses both experimental and observational methods to assess the...

Hu Hsu

History, UC Berkeley