Faculty

Humanities (HUX) Program Faculty

Our professors are among the best in the world. They are accomplished teachers and scholars who want to see their students learn and grow, and who use a variety of contemporary approaches to fulfill that task. Because they are active in their professions and in their areas of research, they bring a wealth of knowledge of the current state of research and of their fields to their courses. Students will see this quality in the design of HUX courses, in the depth of knowledge and experience the faculty bring to instruction, as well as in one-on-one interactions. 

Tahereh Aghdasifar, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor, Women's Studies • CSU Dominguez Hills 

Tahereh Aghdasifar is an Assistant Professor of Women's Studies at California State University, Dominguez Hills. She earned a Ph.D. in Cultural Studies with a certificate in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Emory University. Aghdasifar specializes in queer of color critique, performance studies, and political economy to focus on questions of sociality and opacity. Her current book project develops a theory of refraction reading anti-representational aesthetics of dispossession and displacement to build a collective materialist politics. Her scholarship is published in GLQ, Women & Performance, and A Love Letter to "This Bridge Called My Back," among others, and has been supported by the Institute for Citizens and Scholars (formerly The Woodrow Wilson) Mellon Fellowship, the Center for Black, Brown, and Queer Studies, and the American Association of University Women.

Christina Aushana, Ph.D.

UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Sociology • University of California, Santa Barbara

Christina Aushana works across the anthropology of policing, visual culture and feminist film theory, and performance studies. Her first book project, Scripting Vision, Citing Violence: An Abolitionist Anthropology and Performance Ethnography of Police Training, marks a trajectory toward an abolitionist anthropology of policing by examining the performative co-production of police vision, anti-Blackness, and performances of violent masculinity that render legal categories like reasonable force and escalation; visible and interpretable in police academies. Her research on the tacit conventions of patrol work in San Diego's North African and South West Asian refugee communities has been published in Women; Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, Surveillance & Society, and the Routledge International Handbook of Police Ethnography. She is co-founder of the research collaboratory Feminist Theory Theater, a group dedicated to staging feminist theory as an intervention in situated meaning-making in the academy and beyond, and winner of the 2021 Making and Doing Award from 4S (Society for Social Studies of Science).

Dana Belu, Ph.D.

Professor of Philosophy and Women's Studies • CSU Dominguez Hills

Dr. Belu teaches courses in Continental Philosophy, Philosophy of Technology, History of Philosophy and Feminist Philosophy. Her current research focuses on phenomenological interpretations of the relationship between technology and gender. Dr. Belu was a Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy - Brooklyn College, 2004-2005 and a Research Fellow @ The Center for Subjectivity Research; Copenhagen, Denmark 2005-2006. She has been teaching at CSUDH since 2006. Dr. Belu earned her doctorate in Philosophy from Villanova University.

Patricia Cherin, Ph.D.

Professor Emeritus, Interdisciplinary Studies • CSU Dominguez Hills

Dr. Patricia Cherin is a past Director of HUX and has served as President of the Emeritus Faculty Association at CSUDH. She received her Ph.D. in English from the University of Southern California and specializes in Modernisms, Post Modernisms, and Cultural and Literary Theory. Dr. Cherin has over 100 publications including three collections of poetry.

Wenli Jen, Ph.D.

Lecturer, Asian Pacific Studies Department • CSU Dominguez Hills 

Dr. Wenli Jen is a consultant for Integral Prudence Solutions, a boutique firm focused on guiding people, process and progress in business, health and education. Dr. Jen is a lecturer at CSUDH in the Division of Public Health and Health Sciences and Asian Pacific Studies Department. She is also the current Associate Editor for CSUGlobal, an online academic journal.

Daniel Greenspan, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor, Philosophy Department • CSU Dominguez Hills

Dr. Greenspan teaches courses in the history of ideas from ancient Greece to post-modernity, including Ancient Greek Philosophy, Modern Philosophy, Death & Dying, and Kierkegaard & Freud. He received his Ph.D. from Villanova University and wrote his dissertation on the Danish thinker Søren Kierkegaard while a Fulbright scholar at the Søren Kierkegaard Research Center (University of Copenhagen). His areas of specialization are ancient Greek philosophy, 19th and 20th c. continental philosophy, and philosophy & literature. He has taught at CSUDH since 2008.

Matthew S. Luckett, Ph.D.

HUX Program Coordinator and Director • CSU Dominguez Hills

Dr. Matt Luckett studies and writes about the American West. Originally from the Midwest, Luckett completed his Ph.D. in American history at UCLA in 2014. His first book, Never Caught Twice: Horse Stealing and Culture in Western Nebraska, 1850-1890, won a 2021 Nebraska Book Award. He is currently working on a documentary about earthquake prediction scares in the Mississippi Valley and a book about his grandfather's experiences during World War II. In his spare time, Luckett enjoys woodworking, traveling, cycling, and spending time with his family.

Laura Redford, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor of History • Brigham Young University

Laura Redford previously taught at Scripps College, UCLA, and UCLA's Geffen Academy.  Although a child of the suburbs, Professor Redford is enamored with city history, growth, planning, and politics.  New York remains her favorite city in which she has lived, but Los Angeles, the subject of her research, holds a close second.

Gitanjali Singh

Lecturer, Women’s Studies • CSU Dominguez Hills

Gitanjali "Gina" Singh, an ABD in Gender Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, currently teaches in the Women’s Studies department at California State University Dominguez Hills. She earned two M.A. degrees, one in Gender Studies (2014) and one in Asian American Studies (2004) from UCLA. Gitanjali earned her B.A. degree in Urban Studies from Loyola Marymount University (2000). She began her undergraduate education at the Equal Opportunity Program at Oregon State University in 1996. In her Asian American Studies M.A., her research was on domestic violence organizations in the U.S. South Asian community. Her areas of specialization in research and teaching includes girl studies, diaspora studies, reproductive rights, and transnational feminism. She has taught university classes titled, Women, Work and Family, Race, Class and Gender; The Politics of Women's (Un)Paid Labor; Southeast Asia; Introduction to Asian American Studies; Race and Racism; Foundations in Women's Studies; and U.S. Women of Color.

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