Director
James Vernon is the Helen Fawcett Distinguished Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley. As a historian much of his work has addressed the changing forms of democratic life in Britain and its empire since the nineteenth century. He is interested in the ways in which democratic systems in Britain, and in their late colonial formations across the British empire, were designed to constrain and discipline the demos as much as to empower or emancipate it. His books include Politics and the People (1993), Hunger. A Modern History (2007), Distant Strangers. How Britain Became Modern (2014), and the last volume of the Cambridge History of Britain, Britain since 1750 to the Present (2017). He is editor of Rereading the Constitution (1996) and ‘The Berkeley Series in British Studies’ with University of California Press, as well as co-editor (with Simon Gunn) of The Peculiarities of Liberal Modernity in Imperial Britain (2011) and (with Colleen Lye and Christopher Newfield) “The Humanities and the Crisis of the Public University” in Representations (2011). A critical part of his academic labor since 2009 has been trying to democratize and reactivate shared governance at the University of California as a Board member, and sometimes co-chair, of the Berkeley Faculty Association. His work has been supported by the British Academy, the ESRC, the ACLS, the NEH and the Guggenheim Foundation. He is currently writing a book about the racialized and globalized formation of neoliberalism in Britain after empire told though Heathrow Airport.
Email: jvernon@berkeley.edu
Associate Director
Aarti Sethi is assistant professor at the Department of Anthropology at UC Berkeley. She is a socio-cultural anthropologist with primary interests in agrarian anthropology, political-economy, and the study of South Asia. Her research interests broadly focus on the transformation of rural life-worlds and agrarian capitalism. She is currently working on two projects. The first is a book that examines cash-crop agricultural economies to understand how monetary debt undertaken for transgenic cotton-cultivation transforms intimate, social, and productive relations in rural society. She is particularly concerned with understanding the political economies of small-holder agrarian production in the era of climate change. Her second project called Republic of Readers explores the relationship between reading literacy and libraries as sites of postcolonial democracy and citizenship. While her work is ethnographically located in South Asia, it engages broader debates on agrarian change that view agriculture not as vestigial but as central to the emergence of modern industrial capitalisms. She researches the global linkages between modern state power and rural socio-economic processes, particularly for the intensive capitalization, industrialization and hybridization of agriculture in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Alongside her research in agrarian anthropology she is interested in the social life of agrarian technology, the politics of knowledge and literacy, the anthropology of religion, the history of anthropological thought, multi-species ethnography, and bringing archives and ethnography together. She has previously published in urban ethnography, cinematic, media and visual cultures. Sethi holds degrees in political science, and cinema and cultural studies, from Delhi University and Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi and received her Ph.D. in anthropology from Columbia University. Prior to joining UC Berkeley she held postdoctoral fellowships at Brown and Harvard university.
Email: aartisethi@berkeley.edu
Anti-Colonial Democracy
Co-PI Biographies
Graduate Student Biographies
Democracy Dialogues
Participant Biographies
Angela Marino is an Associate Professor in the Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies. Her research focuses on Performance and Political Theory; Festival and Carnival studies; Popular Performance; Theater History; U.S. Latinx and Latin American Studies. Marino is author of Populism and Performance in the Bolivarian Revolution (Northwestern University Press, 2018); co-editor of Festive Devils in the Americas (Seagull Press/University of Chicago Press, 2015) Prof. Marino is Faculty Affiliate of the Latinx Research Center (formerly known as the Center for Latino Policy Research).
Javier Mateos-Campos is a doctoral student in the Educational Leadership and Policy Studies program at the University of Texas San Antonio. He is a Mexican immigrant, activist-organizer, and multidisciplinary arts-based researcher whose work focuses on the Chicanx experience in the United States, pedagogies of liberation, and decolonial studies. Javi is also a documentarian, photographer, and visual artist specialized in social movements.
Priscilla Vasquez is a Chicana photographer, documentarian, and visual artist from South Texas whose work specializes in capturing a timeless sense of aesthetics to narrate powerful stories. Her work has documented the Yagesero culture in Colombia and Mexico across several years with photographs, video, and contributing in the audio recording of an impressive collection of unique Yagesero music. In her latest work, titled Historias Chicanas del Sur de Tejas, Pris documents reflections of a wide array of Chicanx people and their way of lif
Fostering Democratic Elections in Diverse Societies
Participant Biographies
Jennifer Bussell is Associate Professor of Political Science and Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley and Faculty Director of the Center on Contemporary India. Her research concerns the political economy of development, democratic politics, and governance. Her recent book, Clients and Constituents: Political Responsiveness in Patronage Democracies (Modern South Asia Series, Oxford University Press), considers the provision of constituency service by high-level elected officials in India and elsewhere. In other work, she examines the characteristics of campaign finance, drawing on direct accounts from politicians at all levels of the Indian government. In ongoing research, she is examining the relationship between electoral politics and preparedness for natural disasters, in South Asia and Africa.
Alyssa Heinze is a PhD Candidate in Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley and a Research Associate at the Center on the Politics of Development. She researches gendered understandings of: the political economy of local development, political inequality, and the consequences of climate change using mixed (in-depth qualitative, experimental, and machine-learning) methods. Her dissertation project investigates the role of state and community control of natural resources in entrenching patriarchal gender relations. Her research is located in the Global South, with a focus on India.
Alyssa is a two-time Fulbright fellowship recipient: she received the Fulbright DDRA Fellowship for 2025 and was a Fulbright-Nehru Fellow in Pune, India in 2018. She holds an MSc in Economics from Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and a BA in Political Science and South Asian Studies from Dartmouth College. Outside of the PhD, she’s worked for the Impact Data and Evidence Aggregation Library project at the World Bank, the Research, Evaluation and Data Team at IDinsight, the Women’s Economic Empowerment Unit at the U.S. Department of State, Vera Solutions in Mumbai, India, and Chhori (Daughter) in Kathmandu, Nepal.
Sharik Laliwala is a PhD student in Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. He studies ethnic politics, minority representation, residential segregation in cities, and urban governance, focusing on India. In his dissertation, he plans to investigate the relationship between religious residential segregation and the minority political class in Indian cities utilizing mixed methods (qualitative, observational studies, and machine/deep learning models).
Sharik holds an MA in Contemporary India from King’s College London and a BBA (Economics and Finance) from Ahmedabad University. His current work is supported by Berkeley’s Center of Contemporary India and Global, International & Area Studies Institute. Before PhD, he worked as a researcher with the University of Pennsylvania, Brown University, Sciences Po, and Ashoka University’s Trivedi Center of Political Data.
Alison Post is Associate Professor of Political Science and Global Metropolitan Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research examines urban politics and policy and other political economy themes, including environmental politics and policy, regulation, and business-government relations. Her research, teaching, and advising focus primarily on Latin America and India. She is currently working on a book project on the politics of local infrastructure investment. Her research has been funded by the Hewlett Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the Swedish Research Ministry, and USAID, among others.
