Dr. Victoria Reyes, PhD

Dr. Victoria Reyes is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Riverside. She previously taught in Bryn Mawr College’s Growth and Structure of Cities Department.

Dr. Reyes studies how culture shapes global inequality, with a particular focus on borders, empires, and meaning-making. Using both qualitative and quantitative methods, she has examined globalized travel, World Heritage sites, ships, and legally plural, foreign-controlled places she calls “global borderlands.” Dr. Reyes has also written about transparency and positionality in field work.

Her first book, Global Borderlands: Fantasy, Violence, and Empire in Subic Bay, Philippines, is forthcoming (September 2019) from Stanford University Press. Her work has also been published in Social Forces, Ethnography, Theory and Society, City & Community, Poetics, and International Journal of Comparative Sociology, among other outlets. Dr. Reyes has written for The Conversation, the Monkey Cage at The Washington Post, and Inside Higher Ed and received fellowships from the Institute of International Education (2006-2007 Fulbright Scholar to the Philippines), the National Science Foundation (2009-2012 Graduate Research Fellowship), and the American Sociological Association (2014 cohort, Minority Fellowship Program).

She received her PhD from Princeton University’s Department of Sociology in January 2015, and was a 2016-2017 Postdoctoral Fellow at the National Center for Institutional Diversity at the University of Michigan.