Student

AJ Kurdi

AJ Al-Kurdi is a Ph.D. candidate in Ethnic Studies with a Designated Emphasis in Gender and Women's Studies. His interests fall within political sociology, LGBTQ studies, race, ethnicity, migration, and socio-legal studies. His research examines how Romani and LGBTQI civil society organizations in Hungary address or obscure intersectional discrimination within litigation and policy bodies at the national and European levels under conditions of democratic backsliding. He also researches and writes on LGBTQ movements in the West Asia and North Africa region,...

Alex Huang

Alex Huang is the Lloyd M. Robbins JSD Fellow at UC Berkeley School of Law. Huang’s research focuses on bankruptcy law, corporate law, law and economics, and judicial behavior, with a particular emphasis on applying natural language processing to explore the evolutionary patterns of opinions and contracts. Huang teaches Law and Economics I&II, Sociology of Law, and Law in Chinese Society as a lecturer, tutor and graduate student instructor at the legal studies program and the school of law. Huang’s work has been published in both Chinese and English. He...

Allen Micheal Wright

BELS Fellow

Allen Micheal Wright is a Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology at UC Berkeley, where he studies organizations, law and urban redevelopment. His dissertation is a historical case study of the emergence of private-public partnerships for urban redevelopment, with a focus on urban renewal and land banking. By process tracing the case of urban redevelopment in Detroit from 1950 to 2020, he argues that the emergence of land banking is linked to the demise of urban renewal. He tracks the key moments of this gradual transformation of legal institutions and organizational forms across the local field of...

Alonzo Akerman

Alonzo Ackerman is a Ph.D. student in the Sociology department at UC Berkeley. His research focuses on the transition of teachers' organizations from professional associations to labor unions, and the impact of this on the labor regulation laws these organizations pursue. He holds an MA in sociology from Berkeley and a bachelor's degree in sociology.

Bruno Anaya Ortiz

PhD Candidate
Rhetoric

Bruno Anaya Ortiz is a fifth-year student in the Rhetoric Department. His work is at the intersection of legal studies, political theory, and colonial studies. His dissertation analyzes Spanish-American identity formations in Mexico and the US. In Mexico, he analyzed how courts and the constitution define national identity in contradistinction to both ideas of “Indigenous peoples” and the “West.” He argues that this process re-articulates colonial categories that originated in Spain’s evangelical mission. In the US, he studies the changing vocabularies in which the law has incorporated...

Andrea Clark Gomez

Andrea Clark Gomez is a third-year student at Berkeley Law. She was born in Venezuela and has lived in Argentina, Saudi Arabia, and Texas; these transnational experiences sparked her research interests in human rights and transnational feminism. As a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow, Andrea was trained as an activist-ethnographer and published “‘Eso Ya No Se Consigue’: The Effects of Economic Shortages on Women’s Everyday Lives in Venezuela.” Andrea obtained her Master's in Latin American Studies at the Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies...

Anna Closas

Anna Closas is a Political Theory PhD student focusing on Contemporary Political Theory. Her interests lie in Citizenship and Migration studies and critical work on contemporary discourses and governmentalities. More specifically, her dissertation explores the asylum-seeking process into the United States. Methodologically, she hopes to ground her theoretical and conceptual arguments in empirical realities by using ethnographic methods and interpretivist methodologies.

Before starting her PhD, Anna received a B...

Brie McLemore

Brie McLemore is a PhD candidate in the Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program at the University of California, Berkeley. Her dissertation situates smart street lights, which are equipped with cameras and automatic license plate readers, as a proxy for understanding how technologies became a tool of the Carceral State, even when this was not their intended use, and the consequences for the right to privacy. The Frances S. Coles summer research grant will support the development of her dissertation chapter, titled “‘The Supreme Court is Not Going to Save Us:’...

Caylee Hong

Caylee Hong is a Ph.D. candidate in Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley where she researches urban oil production in the Los Angeles Basin. Prior to Berkeley, Caylee clerked at the Federal Court of Canada and worked as a project finance attorney in New York City. She will be joining the University of Alberta Faculty of Law as an Assistant Professor next summer.

Bonnie Cherry

Bonnie Cherry is a PhD Candidate in Jurisprudence and Social Policy at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law. Her work explores the martial origins of the administrative state, and how the management of Indian affairs shaped civilian administrative policies and enforcement mechanisms from the earliest days of the nation. Her dissertation explores how extraordinary security measures taken against Native peoples and their lands inspired administrative law and organizational practices, which in turn informed broader security policies. Specifically, her work explores how the...