Founding Member

UCLA

Prof. Arranz’s current book-in-progress, Hitza, Herria, Hiria: Hip-Hop-aren Hastapenak Euskal Herrian (Txalaparta 2025) discusses Basque hip-hop in a comparative fashion, paying attention mainly to two vectors: the political message of rap and the transition of Black culture from rural/rustic to urban/modern as the central factors informing the hip-hop made in Basque since the early 90s. There is an apparent non-relation between rap in Basque and the main oral tradition phenomenon in Basque, namely, Bertsolaritza that the book explores as well. Prof. Arranz’s earlier essay Bilbopunk (2012) focuses on the deep architectural and social change that happened in the city of Bilbao in the 1980s, pivoting for that around punk music as the vehicular soundtrack of the transition from the Old Bilbao, into the Guggenheim city. 

Founding Member

UCSB

Viola Miglio is a professor at UC Santa Barbara. She is a linguist working on the rights of minoritized cultures, language change, phonology, and translation. For the last 15 years she has been active in the field of Basque Studies, and in 2010 she was entrusted with the Barandiaran Endowed Chair of Basque Studies at UCSB. Through the Endowment and an agreement with the Etxepare Institute and its lecturers since 2011, she organizes Basque Studies courses and events. She has published a number of articles on linguistics, translation, the 17th century Basque-Icelandic glossaries and the 1615 massacre of Basque whalers in Iceland. Prof. Miglio has also published several books, among which: Las Antiguas Literaturas Celtas y Germánicas (editor, 1995), Markedness and Faithfulness in Vowel Systems (Routledge, 2005), Language Rights and Cultural Diversity (2014), and Basque Whaling in Iceland in the XVII Century: Legal Organization, Cultural Exchange and Conflicts of the Basque Fisheries in the North Atlantic (2015), these last two were co-edited with Prof. Xabier Irujo at the Center for Basque Studies (UNR). She is currently working on a book project tentatively titled Surreptive Migrations: Roma artisans in pre-industrial Italy, and is one of the authors of the Íslensk-spænsk orðabók (Icelandic-Spanish Dictionary, 2011).

Founding Member

UCLA

Nicholas Smith is a former Graduate Student in UCLA’s Department of Spanish and Portuguese, obtaining his Ph.D. in 2025. His dissertation, The Basque Exception: Post-Democratic Structures of Feeling in Contemporary Basque Culture looks at representations of Basque identity and radical politics in a diverse array of post-crisis and post-ETA Basque media, including Fermin Muguruza’s ‘Black is Beltza’ transmedia project, the novels of Katixa Agirre and Aixa de la Cruz, and the emerging post-pandemic Basque music scenes of the 2020s. He also co-authored the article "Non-heroic DIY in the (New) No Future: Reflections from the Basque Country." A common thread throughout his work is the evolving nature of Basque identity and activism in the 21st century, particularly among the Millennial and Gen Z cohorts. Nic is a director of the Basque Educational Organization, a San Francisco-based nonprofit that supports Basque art and literature through engagement with the Basque-American diaspora community.

UCLA

Mikel Etxeberria leads the Digital Foundry team to promote innovation, accelerate the adoption of leading industry practices, and foster cohesive ways-of-working across technology teams and technology modernization portfolios. The Digital Foundry offers accelerators, methodologies, tools, and immersive labs that enable technology teams to rapidly pilot and implement new ways-of-working in support of academic and administrative activities. The key focus areas of the Digital Foundry include human-centered design, cloud and engineering strategy, and the design of modern solution architectures. As part of the innovation agenda, Mikel actively supports the GenAI discovery, socialization, and activation efforts at UCLA. 

Mikel joined UCLA in January 2024 from Deloitte Consulting, where he was a Technology Strategy Manager working with Fortune 500 organizations to define value-first technology strategies, redesign operating models and ways of working, develop actionable roadmaps, and drive cross-functional alignment. He previously worked at Huron Consulting Group, supporting university CIOs in IT operations and security. Before his management consulting work, Mikel spent most of his career in higher education, holding technology management roles at UC Irvine and the University of Central Florida.ription goes here

UCLA

Blake Allmendinger grew up in rural Colorado, and is now a professor in the English Department at University of California, Los Angeles, where he teaches a course on Basque American literature and specializes in literature of the American West. His books include The Cowboy: Representations of Labor in an American Work Culture (Oxford, 1992), Ten Most Wanted: The New Western Literature (Routledge, 1998), Over the Edge: Remapping the American West, coedited with Valerie Matsumoto (Berkeley, 1998), Imagining the African American West (Nebraska, 2005), The Melon Capital of the World: A Memoir (Nebraska, 2015), The Cambridge History of California Literature, ed. (Cambridge, 2015), Geographic Personas: Self-Transformation and Performance in the American West (Nebraska, 2021), and Tongues of Settlement: Where the World Becomes Basque (in progress). His most recent article, “Imitation of Life: Lana Turner’s Mysterious Origins,” will be posted at buber.net on April 21, 2023. Professor Allmendinger has received the Mellon Fellowship (1988-89), the Ahmanson-Getty Fellowship (1994-95), the American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship (2000-01), and the National Endowment of the Humanities Fellowship (2000-01).

UCLA

Sarah T. Roberts, Ph.D. is an associate professor at UCLA (Gender Studies, Information Studies, Labor Studies), specializing in Internet and social media policy, infrastructure, politics and culture, and the intersection of media, technology and society. She is the faculty director and co-founder of the UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry (C2i2), co-director of the Minderoo Initiative on Technology & Power, and a research associate of the Oxford Internet Institute. Informed by feminist Science and Technology Studies perspectives, Roberts is keenly interested in the way power, geopolitics and economics play out on and via the internet, reproducing, reifying and exacerbating global inequities and social injustice. Her book, Behind the Screen: Content Moderation in the Shadows of Social Media (Yale University Press, 2019), was released in paperback with a new preface in 2021, and in translation in French (2020) and in Mandarin (2023). She can be seen in several feature-length documentaries, including The Cleaners (2018), for which her work served as inspiration.ion goes here

Stanford University

Kevin C. Moore is a Lecturer in the Program in Writing and Rhetoric (PWR), and the Coordinator of PWR's Notation in Science Communication. He holds a PhD in English from UCLA (2013). Prior to arriving at Stanford, he taught in the Writing Program at the University of California, Santa Barbara (2013-2019). His current research interests include science communication, Ralph Ellison, as well as propaganda studies. He also writes fiction and creative non-fiction. His work engaging with Basque Studies includes a documentary profile on Bilbao, “State of the Art City” (Souciant 2018), and the article “Visual Art and Propaganda Ecologies in the Basque Country: A Sample of Guernica Motifs from the Benedictine Sticker Archives (1978–1989)”, (co-authored with Iker Arranz Otaegui, ARTS 2022).

Cal. State Monterey

David Vila (Eibar) is an Assistant Professor in the School of World Languages and Cultures with research interests in contemporary Spanish culture and literature; Iberian studies; Basque, Galician and Portuguese culture, literature and languages; subcultural and punk studies; contemporary Iberian and Latin-American song studies; and the relationship between contemporary popular culture and political activism. He is currently working on a book entitled “Punk in Democratic Spain: Resisting Franco’s Legacy since 1975” that explores punk as an underground cultural movement that opposed the way democracy was established in Spain and fueled different contemporary social movements. He has organized and participated in different panels on music and cultural studies and has also published on punk and critical pedagogies. He is also one of the founding members and editors of the cultural magazine Furman217 and singer of the Latinx Alternative band The Rumba Madre .

Cal. State Long Beach

My primary area of research is in the field of variationist sociolinguistics with a special attention to contact situations in minoritized contexts such as Basque-Spanish in Spain and Spanish-English in the US. I combine both qualitative analysis (metapragmatic commentaries, discourse, ideologies) with quantitative methods of speech data to uncover the processes behind contact-induced variation and to explain why such variation occurs the way it does, especially in social situations of rapid social change (i.e. language revitalization, gentrification). 

Cal. State Bakersfield

Dr. Steven Gamboa has been a faculty member in the philosophy program at CSU Bakersfield since 2005.  In his teaching, he aims to balance a commitment to the virtues of critical reflection, open-minded inquiry, intellectual humility, and respect for difference, with an equal emphasis on the value of passionate engagement and intellectual honesty. Dr. Gamboa has mentored dozens of students, more than 20 of whom have gone on to earn graduate degrees in philosophy and other fields.  He has also worked with students as the adviser for the Philosophy & Religious Studies Club.  The Millie Ablin Excellence in Teaching Award honors faculty for contributions made to their students, academic disciplines, and campus communities.