2024-25 HSS Tenture-Track Faculty
Welcome Our New Faculty
Representing the humanities and the social sciences, four new faculty members joined Cal State Fullerton's College of Humanities and Social Sciences in the 2024-25 academic year.
Igor Acácio
Politics, Administration & Justice
Igor Acácio is an Assistant Professor of Political Science in the Division of Politics, Administration, & Justice at California State University, Fullerton. He was previously a Postdoctoral Fellow at Tulane University’s Center for Inter-American Policy and Research (CIPR) and a Hans J. Morgenthau Fellow at the Notre Dame International Security Center (NDISC). He holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Riverside. His research focuses on democracy, civil-military relations, and defense and security issues, with a particular emphasis on Latin America. His work has been published in Comparative Politics, Democratization, Journal of Democracy, Armed Forces & Society, and Public Opinion Quarterly. His research has been supported by the Fulbright Program and the University of California’s Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation (IGCC).
Sean Angst
Politics, Administration & Justice
Dr. Sean Angst earned a Ph.D. in Public Policy and Management from the University of Southern California. His research focuses on housing, community development, and racial justice. Dr. Angst recently completed his dissertation on housing affordability and neighborhood change in South Los Angeles, which examined the impacts of those processes on survival and stress. His broader research agenda centers around urban poverty and health. For the past ten years, he has analyzed structural inequality and innovative policy interventions at the USC Price Center for Social Innovation and USC Equity Research Institute. He has published articles in the Journal of Urban Affairs and Housing Policy Debate, and his past research has been cited by the New York Times and Los Angeles Times.
Jihye Park
Politics, Administration and Justice
Jihye “JJ” Park is an assistant professor of criminal justice at the Division of Politics, Administration, and Justice. She earned her sociology Ph.D. at the University of Iowa. Her research and teaching interests center on social inequality and crime, and criminal punishment. In particular, her dissertation examines the social consequences of punishing immigrants. She also has taught courses including criminology, criminal punishment, and social control of formal institutions. JJ Park has recently published her work in journals such as The British Journal of Criminology, Crime and Delinquency, and Race and Justice.
Sarah Rafael García
Visiting Scholar of Creative Writing
Sarah Rafael García is an award-winning Chicana author and multimedia literary arts advocate from Santa Ana. She earned a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing with a cognate in Media Studies in 2015. Her second book, SanTana’s Fairy Tales, is part of an oral history multimedia exhibition awarded by the Andy Warhol Foundation and an Ethnic Studies text in Santa Ana Unified School District. She is co-editor of Pariahs: Writing from Outside the Margins and Speculative Fiction for Dreamers as well as editor of various editions of Barrio Writers, among other publications and fellowships. García’s Digital Humanities (DH) work began as a 2020 USLDH-Mellon Grantee with University of HoustonUS Latino Digital Humanities Center and includes Mapping Santa Ana, Modesta Avila archives, DH for-and-by the community and Ethnofiction Through Contemporary Narratives in classrooms. García is founder of LibroMobile Arts Cooperative which includes the LibroMobile bookstore and Crear Studio.
Luis Miguel Toquero-Pérez
Modern Languages and Literatures
Luis Miguel Toquero-Pérez is an Assistant Professor of Spanish Linguistics in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures. He holds a PhD in Linguistics from the University of Southern California. His work focuses on probing the properties that all languages share in common (i.e. language universals) and the limits on the possible (language-specific) variation. He does so by looking at the syntax, semantics and morphology of natural languages with a particular emphasis on measure words (e.g. more, many, most), number markers (e.g. plural vs. singular) and cardinal numeral expressions (e.g. 2 jewels, 2 pieces of jewelry). He has a strong commitment to studying underrepresented languages by conducting in-situ and ex-situ fieldwork. He has done fieldwork on Alasha Mongolian (Mongolic), rural Iberian Spanishes (Romance), and Ch’ol (Mayan). His research has been partly supported by a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant awarded by the National Science Foundation (2023-2025, award number BCS 2315167).
Carlos Yebra Lopez
Modern Languages and Literatures
Carlos Yebra Lopez is an assistant professor of Spanish linguistics in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures. He holds a PhD in Spanish and Portuguese from New York University. He specializes in critical sociolinguistics as applied to language ideologies, (hyper)polyglossia, and the revitalization of endangered languages of the Global Hispanophone by digital means. His research focuses on Ladino (Judeo-Spanish), i.e., the language spoken by the Jews who were expelled from the Iberian Peninsula in 1492. He is the author of ‘Decolonizing Spanish: Ladino and Chavacano as Sites of Global Hispanophonia’ (TRANSMODERNITY: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World, 2022) as well as ‘Ladino on the Internet: Sepharad 4’ (Routledge, forthcoming).
