Angélica María Bernal

Angélica Maria Bernal is Associate Professor of Political Sci­ence at UMass Amherst and faculty affiliate with the Center for Latin American, Latinx and Caribbean Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.  Her research and teaching focus on issues of popular power, constitutional change, decolonial theory and politics, and indigenous social movements and resistance in the Americas.  Her first book Beyond Origins: Rethinking Founding in a Time of Constitutional Democracy(Oxford University Press, 2017) was named the 2018 Foundations of Political Theory First Book Award Honorable Mention by the American Political Science Association.  She is the editor of De La Exclusión a la Participación: Pueblos Indígenas y sus Derechos Colectivos en el Ecuador (Abya Yala Press, 2000). She is currently a Fulbright scholar working on a book on the politics of natural resource extraction with a focus on Indigenous resistance and rejection to extractivism in the Ecuadorian Amazon.

• Critical Theory
• Decolonial Theory
• Indigenous Rights and Social Movements in Latin America
• Comparative Constitutionalism

• Bernal Publishes Article On Criminalization Of Indigenous Protest In Ecuador
• Angelica Bernal Publishes Briefing on Ecuador Protests
• Angelica Bernal recipient of an SBS Research Grant from the Dean's Research Council!
• Angélica Bernal Publishes in Special Volume on Jane Gordon's Creolizing Political Theory
• Angélica Bernal Appointed Director of the UMass SBS Academic Leadership Fellows Program
• Professor Angelica Bernal shares some great advice for college students!

• SBS Outstanding Mentor Award, UMASS Amherst, 2022
• ISSR (Institute for Social Science Research) Scholar, UMASS Amherst,  2022-2023
• Fulbright Scholar, Ecuador, 2020-2021*, 2022-2023
• SBS Research Grant, UMASS Amherst, Spring 2019,=
• Distinguished Teaching Award Nominee, UMASS Amherst Spring 2018, Fall 2018
• “Revisioning Political Theory in the Americas,” Center for Latin America, Latinx & Caribbean Studies grant, co-PI with Adam Dahl 
• Graduate-Faculty Initiative-RAship Grant, UMASS Political Science 2014-2016
• PI, Healy Endowment/Faculty Research Grant), UMASS 2012-Present
• Mellon Mutual Mentoring Grant , UMASS 2011-2012 & 2012-2013
• Center for Research on Families Scholar, UMASS, 2011-2012
• Lilly Teaching Fellow, UMASS, 2011-2012

Books

Angélica Maria Bernal.  Beyond Origins: Rethinking Founding in a Time of Constitutional Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017).

Reviews: Contemporary Political Theory (2018); Political Theory (2018); CHOICE (2018); Perspectives on Politics (2019); Review of Politics (2019); Foro Interno: Anuario de Teoría Política (2020); The Palestinian Yearbook of International Law (2021)

Award: 2018 APSA Foundations of Political Thought, First Book Award Honorable Mention

Author Meets Critics Panel (with Adam Dahl, Jane Gordon, Kevin Olson, and Paulina Ochoa Espejo), American Political Science Association, Boston, MA September 2019.

Angélica M. Bernal, editor.  De la Exclusión a la Participación: Pueblos Indígenas y Sus Derechos Colectivos en el Ecuador.  (Quito: Abya Yala Press, 2000). 

Peer Reviewed Journal Articles 

Angélica Maria Bernal. “Ecuador’s Dual Populisms: Neocolonial Extractivism, Violence, and Indigenous Resistance,” Thesis Eleven 164:1 (June 2021): 9-36. https://doi.org/10.1177%2F07255136211025220

Populism(s) Portal: https://thesiseleven.com/populisms-portal/

Angélica Maria Bernal. “Creolizing Foundings: World-Making Beyond Pure Origins,” Symposium on Jane Gordon’s Creolizing Political Theory (Rowan & Little Field), Philosophy & Global Affairs (September 2021). https://doi.org/10.5840/pga202192118  

Angélica Maria Bernal.  “Living Ideology and the Limits of Contestation.”  Review Essay on Katherine Gordy’s Living Ideology in Cuba: Socialism in Theory and Practice (University of Michigan Press, 2015).  The CLR James Journal: A Review of Caribbean Ideas, Volume 23, n. 1/2 (2017).   

Angélica M. Bernal.  “The Meaning and Perils of Presidential Refounding in Latin America.”  Constellations: An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory 21:4 (December 2014), pp. 440-456. [*Lead article in Special Issue “Populism”]

Angélica M. Bernal.  “Power, Powerlessness, and Petroleum: Indigenous Environmental Claims and the Limits of Transnational Law.”  New Political Science 33: 2 (June 2011): 143-167.  [*Winner of the American Political Science Association’s Christian Bay Best Paper Award]

Angélica M. Bernal, “A Revolution in Law’s Republic: Arendt and Michelman in Dialogue.” HannahArendt Net: Zeitschrift für Politisches Denke, Bd. 5, No. 1 (2009).

Book Chapters 

Angélica Maria Bernal, “Contesting Conquest: Tuti Cusi Yupanqui’s Anticolonial Resistance,” in Globalizing Political Theory, edited Kate Gordy, Shirin Delaymi, & Smita Rahman (Routledge Press, 2022).

Angélica Maria Bernal, “Tyranny,” in Democracies in America: Key Words for the 19^th Century and Today, edited by Greg Laski and Berton Emerson (Oxford University Press, 2023).

DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198865698.003.0020

Angélica Maria Bernal.  “Pachamama’s Rights, Climate Crisis, and the Decolonial Cosmos,” in In Search of the Concrete Universal: The Critical Theory Seyla Benhabib (under review Columbia University Press, 2021).  

Angélica M. Bernal.  “Founding.”  The Encyclopedia of Political Thought, Volume 3.  Edited by Michael Gibbons, Diana Coole, Elizabeth Ellis, and Keenan Ferguson (West Sussex, UK: Wiley Blackwell 2015): 1351-1355. 

Angélica M. Bernal.  “De la exclusion étnica a derechos colectivos: Un análisis político del Ecuador.”  In Angélica M. Bernal, ed.  De la Exclusión a la Participación: Pueblos Indígenas y Sus Derechos Colectivos en el Ecuador.  (Quito: Abya Yala Press, 2000).

Book Reviews

Angélica Maria Bernal.  “Review of Joshua Simon’s The Ideology of Creole Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2017),” in Perspectives on Politics (2018). 

Angélica M. Bernal.  “Review of Marc Becker’s ¡Pachakutik! Indigenous Movements and Electoral Politics in Ecuador.”  Latin American Politics and Society 55:3 (Winter 2013): 200-203.

Angélica M. Bernal.  “Review of Paul Apostolidis’ Break in The Chains: What Immigrant Workers Can Teach America About Democracy.”  Perspectives on Politics 10:2 (June 2012).

MEDIA 

Angélica María Bernal & Joshua Holst, “Post Protest, Government. In Ecuador Strikes Out Against Indigenous Leaders,” NACLA, August 4th, 2022. 

Joshua Holst & Angélica María Bernal.  “Debrief: Ecuador’s National Strike,” Rethink Politics June 29^th, 2022. 

UNDERGRADUATE COURSES:

"American Political Thought" (POLISCI 203)

"Indigenous Rights and Social Movements in Latin America" (POLISCI 397)

"Power" (POLISCI 197)

"Issues in Contemporary Political Theory: Citizenship" (POLISCI 374)

GRADUATE COURSES:

"Indigenous Rights and Social Movements in Latin America" (POLISCI 697E)

"Arendt" (POLISCI 691 U)

"Foundings" (POLISCI 797)

"Citizenship" (POLISCI 791)