Torres, Juliana

Field: United States; Advisor: Guridy; Year 2022

Juliana Torres is a Ph.D. candidate in the History Department, where she studies 20th-century United States history. Specifically, Juliana is interested in the social history of ideas and the history of the social and behavioral sciences. Her dissertation, tentatively titled "Making Contact: From Race Relations to Human Relations in American Social Thought in Chicago and California, 1919-1964," is a labor and intellectual history of contact theory, the belief that increased contact between people of different ethnicities tends to combat racism and promote social democracy. It explores how social scientists, independent intellectuals, government officials, and civic, religious, and labor leaders in the first half of the twentieth century launched a pragmatic project to socially engineer human contact to end discrimination through social experience and understanding.

Juliana has an A.A. degree in History and Anthropology from Santa Monica College (2020) and a B.A. in History from the University of California, Berkeley (2022), where she researched the socialist magazine Messenger and its use of the rising status of science to develop and communicate anti-racist ideas.

Outside of academia, Juliana has fifteen years of experience as an archival specialist and researcher for films, documentaries, and podcasts. She has collaborated in fiction and non-fiction projects for Discovery Channel, FX, Globo, PBS, and Stitcher.

Her email is open to any prospective student who wants to know more about life in our department.