Biography
Nicole A. Iturriaga, Ph.D., is Assistant Professor in the Department of Criminology, Law and Society at the University of California, Irvine. Her research examines the intersection of forensic science, human rights, and collective memory, with a focus on how scientific practices shape understandings of historical violence and contemporary extremism. Before joining UCI, she was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Göttingen, Germany.
Iturriaga is the author of "Exhuming Violent Histories: Forensics, Memory, and Rewriting Spain's Past" (Columbia University Press, 2022), which received the American Sociological Association's Collective Behavior and Social Movements Charles Tilly Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Book Award in 2023 and Honorable Mention for the ASA's Peace, War, and Social Conflicts Best Book Award in 2023. Her article "At the Foot of the Grave: Challenging Collective Memories of Violence in Post-Franco Spain" received the ASA's Human Rights Section's Best Article Award in 2020. Her recent work examines how white nationalists mobilize genetics and scientific discourse online, with publications in journals including Social Problems, Theory and Society, and Public Understandings of Science.
Iturriaga received her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2018. Her research has been supported by the Hellman Fellowship, the UCLA Dissertation Year Fellowship, and grants from the Institute for Research on Male Supremacism and UCI Confronting Extremism.
Return to topEducation
- Ph.D. in Sociology, University of California, Los Angeles, 2018
- M.A. in Sociology, University of California, Los Angeles, 2012
- B.A. in Sociology, University of California, Berkeley, 2009
Distinctions
- ASA Peace, War, and Social Conflicts Best Book Award Honorable Mention, 2023
- ASA Collective Behavior and Social Movements Charles Tilly Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Book Award, 2023
- ASA Human Rights Section Best Article Award, 2020
- Institute for Research on Male Supremacism Fellow, 2022-2023
- Hellman Fellowship, 2023-2024
- UCLA Dissertation Year Fellowship, 2017-2018
- UCI Confronting Extremism, 2023-2024
- Peter Kollock Graduate Student Teaching Assistant Award, 2015
- Department of Sociology UCLA Excellence in Teaching, 2011-2013, 2015-2016
Areas of Expertise
- Political Sociology
- Forensic Science and Memory
- Collective Memory of Violence
- Transitional Justice Mechanisms
- White Nationalism Online Discourse
- Gender Science Misinformation
- Racist Agnotology
Recent Publications
- Panofsky A., Dasgupta K., Iturriaga N., Koch B., “Genetics and Scientific Values: Aaron Panofsky, Kushan Dasgupta, Nicole Iturriaga, and Bernard Koch Reply” (opens in new tab), Hastings Center Report, vol. 55, pp. 46-47, 2025.
- Aaron Panofsky, Kushan Dasgupta, Nicole Iturriaga, Bernard Koch, “Confronting the "Weaponization" of Genetics by Racists Online and Elsewhere” (opens in new tab), Hastings Center Special Report, Envisioning a More Just Genomics, vol. 54, pp. S14-S21, 2024.
- Kushan Dasgupta, Nicole Iturriaga, Aaron Panofsky, “Racist Agnotology: How Myth-Making about Institutions and Knowledge Production Contributes to Racialized Ignorance” (opens in new tab), Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, vol. 11, pp. 191-206, 2024.
- Nicole Iturriaga, Aaron Panofsky, Kushan Dasgupta, “Feminist Retroviruses to white Sharia: Gender "science fan fiction" on 4chan” (opens in new tab), Public Understandings of Science, vol. 33, pp. 757-776, 2024.
- Kushan Dasgupta, Nicole Iturriaga, Aaron Panofsky, “Beyond Biological Essentialism: White Nationalism, Health Disparities Data, and the Cultivation of Lay Agnotology” (opens in new tab), Social Problems, vol. 71, pp. 1200-1215, 2023.
- Nicole Iturriaga, “Exhuming Violent Histories: Forensics, Memory, and Rewriting Spain's Past”, Columbia University Press, 2022.
- Kushan Dasgupta, Aaron Panofsky, Nicole Iturriaga, “Trying to Make Race Science the "Civil" Science: Charisma in the Race and Intelligence Debates” (opens in new tab), Theory and Society, vol. 51, pp. 595-627, 2022.
- Nicole Iturriaga, Derek S. Denman, “The Necropolitical Spectrum: Political Lives of the Surplus Dead” (opens in new tab), Human Remains and Violence, vol. 8, no. 1, 2022.
- Aaron Panofsky, Kushan Dasgupta, Nicole Iturriaga, “How White Nationalists Mobilize Genetics: From Genetic Ancestry and Human Biodiversity to Counterscience and Metapolitics” (opens in new tab), American Journal of Physical Anthropology, vol. 175, pp. 387-398, 2021.
- Nicole Iturriaga, Abigail C. Saguy, “Producing a Sense of Linked Fate”, Come Out, Come Out, Whoever You Are, Oxford University Press, 2020.
- Nicole Iturriaga, “The Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo, Framing, and Mnemonic Memory of State Terror” (opens in new tab), Mobilization: An International Quarterly, vol. 24, no. 4, 2019.
- Nicole Iturriaga, “At the Foot of the Grave: Challenging Collective Memories of Violence in Post-Franco Spain” (opens in new tab), Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World, vol. 5, 2019.
- Iturriaga N., “The evolution of the grandmothers of plaza de mayo's mnemonic framing” (opens in new tab), Mobilization, vol. 24, pp. 475-492, 2019.
- Nicole Iturriaga, Abigail Saguy, “I Would Never Want to be an Only Wife, The Role of Discursive Networks and Post-Feminist Discourse in Reframing Polygamy” (opens in new tab), Social Problems, vol. 64, pp. 333-350, 2017.
Contact Information
Website: https://www.nicoleiturriaga.com
Email: n.iturriaga@uci.edu
Phone: (949) 824-9939
Address: 3363 Social Ecology 2, Irvine, CA 92697-7080
Return to topThis profile was created with the help of AI.
Last updated on 2/24/2026.