Faculty/Organizational Partners

Dr. Arianne E. Eason is an Assistant Professor in the Social/Personality and Developmental areas of UC Berkeley’s Department of Psychology. She received her B.S. in psychology from Yale University in 2012 and her Ph.D. from the University of Washington in. Broadly speaking, her research sits at the intersection of social, developmental, and cultural psychology. Specifically, her research examines how features of our social and cultural contexts (e.g., racial segregation, wealth inequality, the lack of contemporary Native representations) influence individuals’ thoughts and feelings about intergroup relations, and how these psychological outcomes, in turn, reify existing inequities. Ultimately, by shedding light on the ways in which our social and cultural contexts work in tandem with what exists in people’s minds (i.e., thoughts, feelings, and actions), we can better work towards creating a more equitable nation. Her research endeavors have been supported by the Ford Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and the Mellon Foundation. 

Dr. Denise Sekaquaptewa comes from two Nations: the Navajo/Dine’ and Hopi tribes of northern Arizona.  She is a University Diversity and Social Transformation Professor of Psychology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA.  Her research program in experimental social psychology focuses on stereotyping, implicit bias, and the experiences of women and underrepresented minorities in science and engineering.  Her research program has been supported by the National Science Foundation, and the National Center for Institutional Diversity.  Dr. Sekaquaptewa served as associate editor for the American Psychological Association journals Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, and Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology.  She is elected Member-at-Large for Science Programming at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, and serves on the Committee on Opportunities in Science at the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She received the Harold R. Johnson Diversity Service Award (2015), and the Sarah Goddard Power Award (2012), from the University of Michigan for her work on diversity-related issues.

A native New Mexican, Paula M. L. Moya is an inheritor of the racial and cultural mestizaje of the Spanish, Jewish, and Native people who have lived together in the region in confict and cooperation for many generations. Fascinated by the relationship between identity, on the one hand, and history, culture, migration, and long-time land tenure, on the other, Moya is especially interested in narratives that successfully convey belonging and community.

Appointed as the Danily C. and Laura Louise Bell Professor of the Humanities at Stanford University, Moya studies contemporary ethnic literature with a focus on narrative and and narrative theory and a specialization in Chicanx/Latinx literature. In fall 2021, she begins an appointment as the Director of the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity where she conducts and supports interdisciplinary research on race and ethnicity.

Adrienne Keene is a Citizen of the Cherokee Nation and an Assistant Professor of American Studies and Ethnic Studies at Brown University. Her research areas include college access, transition, and persistence for American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian Students, including the role of pre-college access programs in student success and Indigenous college student activism. Additionally, she examines representations of Native peoples in popular culture, Native cultural appropriation in fashion and design, and the ways that Indigenous peoples are using the internet, social media, and new media to challenge misrepresentations and create new and innovative spaces for art and activism.

She is the longtime author of Native Appropriations, a blog examining cultural appropriation and contemporary Indigenous topics, as well as the co-creator and co-host of the All My Relations Podcast, which highlights Indigenous issues through a lens of relationality. Her most recent book, Notable Native People: 50 Indigenous Leaders, Dreamers, and Changemakers from past and Present, is an accessible, illustrated text of short biographies, highlighting the contributions of 50 Indigenous community members from history and today.

She earned her BA from Stanford University in Native American Studies and Cultural Anthropology, and her doctorate from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, in Culture, Communities, and Education.

Philip J. Deloria (Dakota descent) is the Leverett Saltonstall Professor of History at Harvard University, where his research and teaching focus on the social, cultural and political histories of the relations among American Indian peoples and the United States. He is the author of several books, including Playing Indian (Yale University Press, 1998), Indians in Unexpected Places (University Press of Kansas, 2004), American Studies: A User’s Guide (University of California Press, 2017), with Alexander Olson, and Becoming Mary Sully: Toward an American Indian Abstract (University of Washington Press, 2019), as well as two co-edited books and numerous articles and chapters. Deloria received the Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale University in 1994, taught at the University of Colorado, and then, from 2001 to 2017, at the University of Michigan, before joining the faculty at Harvard in January 2018. Deloria is a trustee of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian. He is former president of the American Studies Association, an elected member of the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the recipient of numerous prizes and recognitions, and serves as president of the Organization of American Historians in 2022.

Dr. Cong Wang is a Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology. She obtained her Ph.D. in educational psychology from Purdue University in 2019. Dr. Wang’s research focuses on understanding the contextual and individual factors that promote student motivation and learning. She is particularly interested in addressing problems of educational inequality by promoting feelings of belonging, motivation, and performance for students from lower-socioeconomic status and racial minority backgrounds.

We have collaborated closely with the Culture Collaboratory, a research lab that focuses on understanding how culture influences individuals in a wide variety of domains, including identity development, educational attainment, health behaviors, and adversity responses.  You can learn more about their work on the Culture Collab website!