Liam Mayes is a lecturer in the School of Humanities. He teaches courses on political theory, media studies, and poverty studies in the interdisciplinary programs of Politics, Law and Social Thought (PLST) and Cinema and Media Studies (CMST).

Dr. Mayes's research explores issues of poverty, democracy, and the changing dynamics of social movements and protests in North America. His current book project, titled The Broken Hermeneutics of American Poverty, examines ethnographic accounts of poverty and argues that the emergence of the American affluent society in the twentieth century shifted the foundations on which poverty, inequality, and the divisions between rich and poor and between elites and non-elites are understood. In a forthcoming manuscript, Dr. Mayes takes a global, comparative approach to analyze the 2022 Freedom Convoy, a right-wing protest that took place on Canadian highways and in front of the Canadian Parliament.

In addition to his position at Rice, Dr. Mayes is the Assistant Director of the Center for Transcultural Studies (Chicago and New York). He has organized over 50 national and international conferences and symposia, most recently developing and teaching interdisciplinary graduate courses in globalization and democratic theory at the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary.