• Victoria Reyes

    Sociologist

What she studies

Victoria Reyes is a sociologist who studies culture, borders, and empires. Her research and teaching interests include culture, global and transnational sociology, economic sociology, urbanism, historical/comparative sociology, qualitative methods, race/ethnicity, gender, and law and society.

Her work

She is author of the award-winning Global Borderlands: Fantasy, Violence, and Empire (Stanford University Press, 2019). Her award-winning work has also been published in Social Forces, Ethnography, Theory and Society, City & Community, Poetics, and International Journal of Comparative Sociology, among other outlets.

Awards and recognitions

She’s received fellowships, awards and/or grants from the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, Independent Book Publisher Awards, American Association of University Women, National Science Foundation, American Sociological Association, Institute of International Education, Law and Society Association, National Women’s Studies Association, and National Center for Institutional Diversity at the University of Michigan, among others. She is also a member of the Scholars Strategy Network and SheSource, and has written for The Conversation, the Monkey Cage at the Washington Post, and Inside Higher Ed.

My research focuses on the questions “What is territoriality? How does it play out on-the-ground? How has it changed over time? What axes of inequality shape these processes?”

To that end, I examine the relationship between state and place, and the reproduction of borders and boundaries.  More specifically, I draw on work in cultural sociology to rethink sovereignty and the political economy as cultural practices. 

DIVERSITY, EQUITY, INCLUSION

Victoria is committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in her research, teaching, and service and received the 2020 Mellon Emerging Faculty Leaders Award, given by the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, in recognition and support of her DEI work. She believes in both mentoring underrepresented students and advocating for structural change at the level of the department, university and profession. For example, she mentors and incorporates a diverse team of undergraduates in her research and writes advice columns to reveal the “hidden curriculum” of academia for underrepresented, first generation and other graduate and undergraduate students from marginalized and/or disadvantaged backgrounds. She received UCR Department of Sociology’s 2019 Outstanding Faculty Mentor of Graduate Students Award, for which she was nominated by graduate students. In her service work, she currently serves on UCR’s Academic Senate’s Committee on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. She also help spearhead two new awards in the Community & Urban Sociology Section: one on publicly-engaged research and one for exceptional teaching, both of which recognize the diverse ways faculty, particularly those from underrepresented groups, contribute to the profession, and helped institutionalize the Culture section’s Graduate Student Travel Awards, among other activities.

LEADERSHIP

Victoria has been elected and appointed to leadership positions in various sections of the American Sociological Association, including the Sociology of Culture, Global and Transnational Sociology, Community & Urban Sociology, Theory, Sociology of Development, Asia and Asian America, Consumers and Consumption, and Political Economy of the World System sections, and has served as a volunteer for the Comparative/Historical Sociology and Economic Sociology sections. She also is involved with the Sociologists for Women in Society, where she is currently an elected member of the publications committee, and previously served as an elected member of the awards committee, where she chaired the feminist activism award committee. She also previously served as a Culture Network Representative for the Social Science History Association.

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