Chancellor's Professor of Political Science and Law - Department of Political Science, UC Berkeley Law
Kinch Hoekstra specializes in the history of political, moral, and legal philosophy. He has written on ancient, renaissance, and early modern political thought. He has published a number of studies on ancient political thought, including "Athenian Democracy and Popular Tyranny" (2016) and "Thucydides and the Politics of Necessity" (2017, with Mark Fisher). Another focus of research has been the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes (including studies of his theory of equality, obligation, democracy, tyranny, mixed government, natural law, and the rationality of justice); he co-edited The Oxford...
Assistant Professor - Department of Spanish and Portuguese
Paulina León specializes in the cultural and literary histories of early modern Spain and colonial Latin America, with a focus on the diverse—and often conflicting—medical cultures of the Spanish empire. Her research brings together literary analysis, print culture, writing practices, and healthcare paradigms. She has published on festive poetry commemorating deliverance from pestilence in seventeenth-century Cádiz and on theatrical representations of mass mortality in sixteenth-century Mexico City. Her current book project, Writing Contagion: Cultures of Plague in the Early Modern...
Much of my work concentrates on the intersection between literature and religious practice in Renaissance literature and culture, in particular on the relationship between prayer, meditation, spiritual exercises, and poetry. I have published on religious and secular concepts of attention, on apocalypse as a literary and political figure, and on philosophy of history and comparative literature. My first book Death Be Not Proud: The Art...
Sugata Ray is Associate Professor of South and Southeast Asian art and architecture in the History of Art Department. Trained in both history and art history, Ray’s research focuses on the intersections among early modern and colonial artistic cultures, transterritorial ecologies, and the natural environment. His first book, Climate Change and the Art of Devotion: Geoaesthetics in the Land of Krishna, 1550–1850 (2019), examined the interrelationship between matter and life in shaping creative practices in the Hindu pilgrimage site of Braj during the...
