Ricarda Hammer is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research and teaching engage questions of colonialism, postcolonialism, empire, race, and social theory, examining how historical structures of power continue to shape contemporary political and social life. Her current work focuses on the enduring legacies of colonialism in shaping racial politics, citizenship, and liberal democracy. She approaches these questions from the vantage point of the Caribbean as a critical site of global historical transformations and she is interested in how Black radical and anticolonial thought can inform social theory and knowledge politics.  

Ricarda is currently writing a book on abolition in the British and French Caribbean, exploring how dominant, liberal visions of abolition overshadowed radical alternatives imagined by revolutionaries from below. Her research recovers political imaginaries erased from European political genealogies, offering a radical rethinking of democracy grounded in anticolonial peasant struggles. She is also co-editing an upcoming volume, Upending the Color Line: Towards a Du Boisian Sociological Methodology (Duke University Press). Her research has been published in Sociological Theory, Du Bois Review, Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, Political Power and Social Theory, and Teaching Sociology. 

At Berkeley, Ricarda co-leads the Anticolonial Lab alongside Michael Rodríguez-Muñiz and Tianna Paschel, examining sites of anticolonial solidarity across the world, with a particular focus on movements in the Caribbean and the Bay Area.

Before joining Berkeley, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She holds a PhD and MA in Sociology from Brown University and a BA in Social and Political Sciences from the University of Cambridge.