Core Faculty

Luciano N. Cruz
Office: NH-212
Email: [email protected]

Luciano N. Cruz is a lecturer in the Department of Sociology and the Behner Stiefel Center for Brazilian Studies at San Diego State University. He holds a Ph.D. in Education from Claremont Graduate University, a master's degree in Sociology from San Diego State University, and a bachelor's degree from Southern Oregon University. His research interests focus on comparative racial relations between the United States and Brazil, with a specific emphasis on the Black Diaspora.

Since December 2019, Dr. Cruz has served as a research member of the Laboratory of Education of Ethnic-Racial Relations (LABERER) at the Federal University of Pernambuco. LABERER is a CNPq-registered group dedicated to research, extension, and intervention actions aimed at fostering the social inclusion and educational advancement of historically excluded ethnic-racial populations in Brazil. 

Viviane Kraieski de Assunção
Office: AL-522
Email: [email protected]

Viviane Kraieski de Assunção is currently a Visiting Professor at San Diego State University. She holds a Ph.D. and a master’s degree in Social Anthropology from the Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC) and completed a doctoral research fellowship at the Institute of Latin American Studies at Columbia University. She was a postdoctoral fellow in Anthropology at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. She has experience in teaching and research in environmental anthropology. Her research focuses primarily on the following areas: development projects and environmental impacts; food, consumption, and disposal; and urban environments, cultures, and socio-spatial practices. She is currently conducting research projects in Southern California examining the intersections between extreme heat and social inequality, as well as the social effects of lithium extraction.

Arthur Schott Lopes
Office: AL-561
Email: [email protected]

Arthur Schott Lopes is an assistant professor of Brazilian history. Schott Lopes earned an M.A. in the social sciences and a Ph.D. in history at the University of Chicago, and a B.A. in history at Harvard College. He is a political historian of Brazil interested in the nexus between institutional conflict and the violence of everyday life; in histories of politics that go beyond national and state capitals; in borderlands and frontiers; and in the intersection between political, economic, and environmental history.

His first book project is a history of military intervention into land conflict at Brazil’s Triple Border with Argentina and Paraguay during the 20th century. The project reassesses civilian-military relations away from barracks and government palaces, demonstrating how military actors became political players on the ground before Brazil’s military coup of 1964, and how they helped build a rural political economy grounded on environmental and human exploitation well before the military dictatorship’s 1970s Amazonian colonization policies.

Abner Francisco Sótenos
Office: AL-520
Email: [email protected]

Abner Francisco Sótenos is a historian of modern Brazil and lecturer in Africana Studies at San Diego State University. He received his Ph.D. in History from the University of California, San Diego, and holds an M.A. in Social History from the Graduate Program in Social History (PPGHIS-UFRJ) and a B.A. in History from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ). His research focuses on race, Black intellectual and cultural history, cinema and visual culture, social movements, and Black internationalism.

His current book project, Inside the Aesthetics of Racial Democracy: Black Authorship and the Long Making of Afro-Brazilian Cinema, 1944–1988, examines the intellectual and artistic contributions of Black actors, filmmakers, and cultural workers to Brazilian cinema. He is co-editor of História escrita, história vivida: movimentos sociais, memória e repressão política durante a ditadura militar no Brasil (Lamparina, 2019), and his article “Uneven Ground: Afro-Brazilian Communities, the Diocese of Nova Iguaçu, and Grassroots Democracy under Brazil’s Military Dictatorship” is forthcoming in Latin American Perspectives.

At the Behner Stiefel Center for Brazilian Studies, his current work brings together research, teaching, and community engagement, including research on Brazilian immigrant communities in Southern California. His broader scholarship examines Black cultural production, grassroots politics, racial inequality, and the relationship between cultural authorship and struggles for citizenship in modern Brazil.

 

Researcher/Visiting Scholar

Adriano Mendes
Office: AL-522
Email: [email protected]

Adriano Mendes holds a B.A. in Public Administration and an M.A. in Urban and Regional Planning from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ). He is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Social Sciences at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio). During the Fall 2026 semester, he is a Research Scholar at the Behner Stiefel Center for Brazilian Studies, where he also serves as a social media consultant.

His research examines the relationships between technology, power, and the city, with a focus on the technopolitics of surveillance and the use of cameras and facial recognition systems in urban spaces. He analyzes how these technologies reshape practices of security, control, and territorial monitoring, producing new forms of urban governance and surveillance, particularly in contexts marked by social, racial, and spatial inequalities.

He is also a researcher and editorial collaborator for the  Marielle Franco Dictionary of Favelas (WikiFavelas/Fiocruz), where he contributes to the production, systematization, and dissemination of knowledge on favelas and peripheral urban areas. His academic and professional trajectory brings together urban studies, inequality, racial relations, public security policy, and surveillance technologies, seeking to understand how technological infrastructures and control devices transform the ways cities are produced, governed, and experienced.