Daniel P. Gámez
Dr. Daniel P. Gámez is a Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow with the Departments of History and American Indian Studies. He is also affiliated with the project “Race in the Global Past through Native Lenses,” supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. He received his PhD in Geography from The University of British Columbia (Unceded Xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam) Territory). Daniel is a proud first generation scholar who writes and works as a community-based researcher and activist in the study of Latin American colonialism, racialization, Indigenous sovereignty, and imperial urbanism.
Daniel collaborates with grassroots organizations in Abya Yala (Latin America), particularly in Mexico. Drawing on the work of Indigenous, Black, and Latinx anticolonial thinkers, his work examines the ways urban Indigenous communities organize to transform infrastructures and political institutions in ways that assert sovereignty and self-determination.
Dexter Story
Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow Dexter Story is a musician, composer, music director, and Ph.D. in Ethnomusicology at UCLA. His dissertation, “Guayla Nation: Unyielding Tigrinya Music, Dance, and Identity in Eritrea,” explores how Eritreans use guayla to build community and navigate their struggles for freedom. Dexter also holds an M.A. in African Studies from UCLA and a B.A. in French Literature from UC Berkeley. His research, publications, and creative projects span African diasporic music, jazz, and ethnographic methodologies.
Ben Zdencanovic
Ben Zdencanovic (pronounced sten-CHAN-oh-vich) is a Postdoctoral Associate at the UCLA Luskin Center for History and Policy and a Lecturer in the UCLA Department of History. He is a historian of the United States in the world, domestic and international politics, and economic and social policy.
Ben is currently working on two book projects. The first, tentatively titled Island of Enterprise: The End of the New Deal and the Rise of U.S. Global Power in a World of Welfare, 1940 – 1955, traces connections between the end of New Deal reformism, the rise of U.S. global power, and the birth of social and economic rights and the modern welfare state around the world in the mid-twentieth century. His second book is a major reevaluation of the “War on Poverty” in the 1960s, viewing it as a political-economic response to the manpower imperatives of racial capitalism, the Cold War national security state, and the unfolding conflict in Vietnam.
He has published peer-reviewed articles in the Journal of Transatlantic Studies and the Radical History Review. In addition to his scholarly writing, he has written essays on history, policy, and politics for popular audiences in outlets such as Jacobin, the Boston Review, and the Washington Post. His writing and research have been supported by numerous grants and fellowships from such sources as the Yale Macmillan Center, the Rockefeller Archive Center, the Roosevelt and Truman presidential libraries, the University of Illinois Foundation, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Ben earned his doctorate with distinction from the Department of History at Yale in 2019, where his dissertation was the winner of the Edwin W. Small Prize for outstanding work in United States history. Prior to coming to UCLA, Ben was a postdoctoral fellow at the Yale Jackson School for Global Affairs and an Assistant Instructional Professor at the University of Chicago.
