Regular Faculty
Viviana MacManus, Chair
Associate Professor, Critical Theory & Social Justice
B.A., Â鶹ÊÓƵ; Ph.D., University of California, San Diego
Viviana Beatriz MacManus’s research and teaching focuses on Latin American and Latinx feminist theory, literature, film, and cultural studies.
Mary Christianakis
Professor, Critical Theory and Social Justice
B.A., UCLA; M. Ed., UCLA; M.A., Loyola Marymount University; Ph.D., UC Berkeley
Mary Christianakis is a professor of language, literacy, and culture. She studies literacy development, language, and discourse from a critical sociocritical perspective.
Carla M. Macal
Assistant Professor, Critical Theory and Social Justice
B.A. University of California, Irvine; M.A. University of Southern California; Ph.D. University of Oregon
Carla Macal is an interdisciplinary anti-colonial feminist scholar dedicated to community-engaged research addressing the intersections between state violence and intergenerational healing. From 2024-2025, she was a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow at UC San Diego’s Department of Literature. She will be joining the Critical Theory and Social Justice Department as an Associate Professor, teaching Decolonizing Education and Indigenous Feminisms. Dr. Macal is working on her book-in-progress, Healing Cartographies: GuateMaya Feminists Weaving Transformative Memory across the Hemisphere, which follows the oral and embodied testimonies of Guatemalan and Maya women survivors of the 36-year (1960-1996) war and their production of counter-cultural memory. She is the creator of Ixoq Arte, an herbalist project preserving ancestral Indigenous knowledge.
Ben Ratskoff
Assistant Professor, Critical Theory and Social Justice
B.A. Northwestern University; M.A., Ph.D. University of California, Los Angeles
Professor Ratskoff specializes in histories and theories of antisemitism, race, and fascism; Holocaust and genocide studies; Black diasporic culture and thought; and critical theory and cultural studies.
Non-Tenure Track Faculty
Marisol León
Visiting Assistant Professor, Critical Theory and Social Justice; Pre-Law Advisor
B.A., Yale University; M.A., Loyola Marymount University; J.D., U.C. Berkeley School of Law
Marisol León teaches CTSJ 212, 214, 221, and 250. Her courses are designed for students dedicated to social justice and interested in leveraging the law as a tool for positive social change.
Malek Moazzam-Doulat
Resident Associate Professor, Critical Theory and Social Justice
B.A., Â鶹ÊÓƵ; Ph.D., State University of New York, Stony Brook
Prof. Malek Moazzam-Doulat is a professor in the Critical Theory & Social Justice Department focusing on global responses to modernity. He received his Ph.D. in philosophy from SUNY Stony Brook.
Rosie Stockton
Visiting Instructor
B.A. Reed College; M.A. Eastern Michigan University; Ph.D. University of California, Los Angeles
Rosie Stockton’s research focuses on abolitionist feminisms, Black feminist thought, and queer and trans critique to think with political and aesthetic practices of anti-carceral resistance. They look specifically at the political economy of the California carceral state, focusing on long term sentencing, the criminalization of social reproduction, and queer abolitionist practices of care, kinship, and mutual aid. They are an organizer with the California Coalition for Women Prisoners (CCWP) and the director of the Creative Writing Stream of the UC Sentencing Project, where they facilitate a poetry workshop at the California Institution for Women. They are also a poet and the author of Permanent Volta (Nightboat Books 2021) and Fuel (Nightboat Books 2025). Research Interests: Abolitionist Feminisms, Black Feminist Thought, and Queer and Trans Critique, Political Economy, Marxist and Materialist Inquiry, Poetry and Queer Social Movements, Critical Theory.