SA Smythe:
SA will be joining the department of Anthropology as a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow before joining the faculty of African American Studies at UCLA. Smythe earned a PhD in History of Consciousness from UC Santa Cruz in 2017, with designated emphases in Feminist Studies and Literature. Their book manuscript, Crisis and the Canon: Rethinking the Black Mediterranean, is a trans-disciplinary intervention that engages Black cultural & literary studies, queer and trans studies, and Mediterranean studies. Smythe is a founder and organizing member of the Queer Studies Caucus of the American Association of Italian Studies and publishing editor of THEM – Trans Literary Journal. Smythe is a published and performing poet and an activist who organizes within queer/trans Black and abolitionist poetry collectives in London, Bologna, Berlin, and Los Angeles. We very much look forward to SA's arrival. To learn more about SA Smythe please visit https://essaysmythe.com

Hector Beltran:
Hector Beltran will be joining the department of Anthropology as a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow. Hector is a recent PhD from UC Berkeley's anthropology department. His research is on “hacking imaginaries,” “codeworlds,” and “code work.” He came to this topic, and to anthropology, from a background in computer science at MIT and direct experiences with coding. Like many great anthropologists who came to the discipline from the sciences (Boas and Malinowski, for example), Hector draws on his engineering and computing background as he develops theoretical issues that enhance and push anthropology’s cutting edge, especially by examining the not just the technical aspects of hacking but the political aspects, and issues of identity, race, ethnicity, class, and nation.