Thuy Vo Dang

Thuy Vo Dang (she/her/hers) is Assistant Professor of Information Studies and Asian American Studies at UCLA. She holds a Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies from University of California, San Diego and a B.A. in English and Asian American Studies from Scripps College. Her previous role was Curator for the UCI Libraries Southeast Asian Archive and Research Librarian for Asian American Studies. With research and teaching expertise in oral history, Southeast Asian diaspora, community archives, and cultural memory, Thuy brings an interdisciplinary approach to co-creating digital humanities and archival documentation projects with educators and community-based organizations. She is co-author of the books A People’s Guide to Orange County (2022) and Vietnamese in Orange County(2015). Thuy serves on the board of directors for Arts OC and the Vietnamese American Arts & Letters Association.

Benjamin K.P. Woo

Benjamin K.P. Woo, M.D., (胡啟贇醫生) is Professor of Clinical Psychiatry and Asian American Studies at UCLA.  He is the Psychiatry Clerkship Director at the Olive View – UCLA Medical Center.  Also, he is the faculty advisor for the UCLA Asian Pacific Health Corps (APHC), an undergraduate student organization that promotes health awareness in the Asian communities.  Professor Woo directs the Chinese American Health Promotion Laboratory at UCLA.  He has published many articles addressing mental health care disparities amongst Chinese Americans in the fields of emergency psychiatry and geriatric mental health.  Since 2009, he has spoken on 140+ radio shows on mental health topics on the only Cantonese radio station in Los Angeles, KMRB AM1430.

He has received many awards and honors for his work and teaching – among others, the Award for Excellence in Education from the UCLA School of Medicine, the Hoshide Distinguished Teaching Prize in Asian American Studies at UCLA, the Advancing Minority Mental Health Award from the American Psychiatric Foundation, and the Roeske Teaching Award from the American Psychiatric Association where he is also a Distinguished Fellow.

WEBSITE: https://profiles.ucla.edu/benjamin.woo

Lois Takahashi

UCLA Luskin professor emeritus Takahashi’s research focuses on public and social service delivery to vulnerable populations in the U.S. and in Southeast Asian cities. Her expertise spans several issues, including homelessness and HIV/AIDS in Los Angeles, community opposition directed at social services (the NIMBY syndrome) in the U.S., social capital and health for vulnerable populations, and environmental governance in the U.S. and Southeast Asian cities.

She is currently investigating the dynamics of social capital, especially related to health in impoverished and marginalized communities. Her environmental governance research (with her collaborators Amrita Daniere and Jeffrey Carpenter) has investigated the role of low-income residents and non-governmental organizations in environmental management and policy making in Bangkok, Thailand and Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.

She is a past Director of the University of California Asian American and Pacific Islander Policy Multicampus Research Program (UC AAPI Policy MRP), where she worked with state elected officials and community organizations to develop policy relevant studies that highlight areas of importance for California’s AAPI population. Recent reports have focused on educational disparities and victimization/incarceration patterns.

She has served as president of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning.

She taught courses on Planning Theory and History, Locational Conflict; Homelessness: Housing and Social Service Issues and Urban Policy and Planning.

Takahashi served as interim dean during the time that a search was underway for a permanent successor to Frank D. Gilliam, Jr.

Shu-mei Shih

Roberto Chao Romero

With a Mexican father from Chihuahua and a Chinese immigrant mother from Hubei in central China, Romero’s dual cultural heritage serves as the basis for his academic studies.

His research examines Asian immigration to Latin America, as well as the large population of “Asian-Latinos” in the United States. His first book, The Chinese in Mexico, 1882-1940 (2010), tells the forgotten history of the Chinese community in Mexico.   The Chinese in Mexicoreceived the Latina/o Studies Section Book Award from the Latin American Studies Association.

Drawing upon his background as attorney, Romero’s second area of research examines the legal history of Chicano/Latino segregation as well as immigration  law and policy. His most recent research explores the role of spirituality in Chicana/o social activism.

Romero received his J. D. from UC Berkeley and his Ph.D. in Latin American history from UCLA.

Vinit Mukhija

Vinit Mukhija is a Professor and Department Chair of Urban Planning in the Luskin School of Public Affairs at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

His research focuses on informal housing and slums in developing countries and “Third World-like” housing conditions (including colonias, unpermitted trailer parks, and illegal garage apartments) in the United States. He is particularly interested in understanding the nature and necessity of informal housing, and strategies for upgrading and improving living conditions in unregulated housing. His work also examines how planners and urban designers in both developing and developed countries can learn from the everyday and informal city.

Four research questions and objectives guide his research. First, what is the nature of informal housing, including its prevalence, characteristics, heterogeneity, determinants, rationale, advantages and disadvantages? Second, how can living conditions within slums and informal housing be improved, and what is the role of different institutional actors, including state, civil society, and market actors, within this process? Third, how should conventional planning and urban design approaches change in response to the prevalence of informality, particularly informal housing? Fourth, how do policy ideas in housing and land development travel and spread in a globalized world? The broad objective of his work is to help identify and improve strategies for increasing access to decent housing among the urban poor as a planning pathway to social and spatial justice.

Professor Mukhija’s current and past major projects include research on slum upgrading and redevelopment in Mumbai (Bombay), India; research on colonias, infrastructure-poor neighborhoods, and unpermitted trailer parks in California; evaluation of inclusionary housing requirements in Southern California; research on legal and illegal garage apartments or “Backyard Homes” in Los Angeles as a form of affordable housing and stealth density; and research on the nature of informality in U.S. cities. He is the author of one book, Squatters as Developers? Slum Redevelopment in Mumbai (Ashgate, 2003), and co-editor of a recently published volume, The Informal American City: Beyond Taco Trucks and Day Labor(MIT Press 2014, with Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris).

Professor Mukhija trained as an urban planner (Ph.D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology), urban designer (MUD, University of Hong Kong), and architect (M.Arch., University of Texas, Austin, and B.Arch., the School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi). He also has professional experience as an urban designer and physical planner in India, Hong Kong, and Kuwait with new town design proposals and projects in India, China, and the Middle East. Before coming to UCLA he worked as a post-doctoral researcher for the Fannie Mae Foundation in Washington, D.C., and developed neighborhood upgrading and renewal strategies for American cities. Some of his past projects have been funded by the Haynes Foundation, the California Policy Research Center, the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), and the World Bank.

Professor Mukhija has won multiple awards for his teaching at UCLA (2007, 2009 and 2013), and his teaching portfolio includes courses on informality in U.S. cities, housing policies in the majority world, and planning studios. Recent neighborhoods for his studios have included Downtown Los Angeles (2014), Atwater Village (2012), East Hollywood (2011), the City of Bell (2010), East Los Angeles (2009), Pacoima (2008), and Hyde Park (2007).

Professor Mukhija has also advised the newly formed Indian Institute of Human Settlements, Bangalore, on course and curriculum development. His other community and public service contributions include membership on the Board of Directors of the Los Angeles Area Neighborhood Initiative (LANI), a non-profit focused on community-based urban revitalization strategies; service as the Co-Chair of the Global Planning Educators Interest Group (GPEIG) within the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning (ACSP); and as an editorial advisory board member of the Journal of the American Planning Associationand the Journal of Planning Education and Research.

Ailee Moon

Dr. Moon’s areas of research interest include social welfare policy, program evaluation, and gerontology.

As a principal investigator on a five-year inter-university consortium research project funded by the California Department of Social Services, she recently completed an evaluation study of the implementation of family preservation and support programs in California.

Her recent research activities also include “Evaluation of the API Dementia Care Network,” funded by the Alzheimer’s Association of Los Angeles, “Evaluation of General Relief Time Limit Policy in Los Angeles County” and “Evaluation of the ‘Community Empowerment Project: Domestic Violence Prevention in the Korean American Community,’” funded by the California Department of Health. Dr. Moon, with Dr. Young In Song at California State University, Hayward, is a co-editor of two books, entitled Korean American Women Living in Two Cultures and Korean American Women: From Tradition to Modern Feminism.

Dr. Moon is also active in gerontological research, particularly, in the areas of elder abuse, mental health, and service utilization. Currently, she is a Hartford Geriatric Social Work Faculty Scholar, funded to study “Cultural and Non-Cultural Factors in Elder Abuse Assessment and Intervention.” Dr. Moon and her colleagues completed a study, titled “A Multicultural Study of Attitudes toward Elder Mistreatment and Reporting,” funded by the National Center on Elder Abuse.

She was a co-principal investigator with Dr. James Lubben on a four-year study funded by the National Institute on Aging that examines social supports and long-term care use among elderly Korean and non-Hispanic white Americans. Dr. Moon has published 55 articles, book chapters, research reports and monographs.

Dr. Moon is serving as the director of the Department’s Ph.D. program.

Michelle Caswell

Her current research explores the role of records and archival institutions in the construction of memory about the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and traces a collection of mug shots taken at Tuol Sleng prison from their creation as bureaucratic documents, to their inclusion in archives, digitization, and use by survivors and the family members of victims to spark narratives about the regime and memorialize the dead.

Her articles have appeared in Archival Science, Archivaria, American Archivist, The Journal of Documentation, InterActions, First Monday, and Libri.

Caswell is also the co-founder and a board member of the South Asian American Digital Archive (http://www.saadigitalarchive.org).

Anna S. Lau

For more information please visit laulab.psych.ucla.edu.

Vinay Lal

Vinay Lal was born in Delhi and raised in India, Indonesia, Japan, and the United States.

He studied literature, history, and philosophy as an undergraduate, and earned his B.A. from the Humanities Center at Johns Hopkins University in 1982. He received a M.A. from the same institution, also in 1982, for a thesis on Emerson and Indian Philosophy. He then studied film in Australia and India on a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship before commencing his graduate studies at the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago, where he was awarded his Ph.D. with Distinction in 1992. His dissertation, “Committees of Inquiry and Discourses of ‘Law and Order’ in Twentieth-Century British India”, received the Marc Galler Award for the best dissertation in the Division of the Humanities at the University of Chicago. He was a William R. Kenan Fellow, Society of Fellows in the Humanities, and Lecturer in History, at Columbia University in 1992-93.

Vinay joined the history faculty at UCLA in Fall 1993, and has since held several fellowships, including a Senior Fellowship from the American Institute of Indian Studies, a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for University Teachers, and a fellowship from the Society for the Promotion of Science/Japan Area Studies Center at the National Museum of Ethnology, Osaka. He was elected a Fellow of the World Academy of Art and Science in February 2000.

Vinay teaches a broad range of courses in Indian history, comparative colonial histories, subaltern history and Indian historiography, as well as graduate level seminars on the contemporary politics of knowledge, postcolonial theory, and the politics of culture. He has designed and taught a cycle of upper-division undergraduate lecture courses on British India, Contemporary South Asia, the Indian Diaspora, and the Moral and Political Thought of Mohandas Gandhi. Seminars in Indian history cover such subjects as the Politics of Religion and Ethnicity in South Asia; Hindu-Muslim Encounters in South Asia; “The Woman Question” in Colonial India; The Life of Krishna in Indian Art, History, and Culture; History and the Novel; the Partition of India; Violence in Contemporary Indian Society; and History and Popular Cinema.  His lecture courses in Indian history are now available in their entirety on YouTube, a link to which can be found below.

Vinay has written regularly on a wide variety of subjects for periodicals in the US, India, and Britain. Among other subjects, he has written on various aspects of the political and legal history of colonial India, sexuality in modern India, the popular Hindi film, the Indian diaspora, Indian documentaries, the politics and history of history, dissent in the Gandhian mode, contemporary American politics, the politics of culture, genocide, and the global politics of knowledge systems. His fifteen books reflect a similarly broad range of intellectual, political and research interests. His articles, reviews, commentaries, and op-pieces have appeared in over 150 publications. At present, he is a frequent contributor to The Indian Express and the Economic and Political Weekly (Mumbai).

Vinay was formally associated as a Visiting Fellow in the summers of 1993 and 1994 with the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies and the Delhi-based Committee for Cultural Choices and Global Futures. In more recent years, he has been associated since its inception with Multiversity, a group of scholars, intellectuals and activists that meets every other year in Penang, Malaysia, with the objective of engaging in a radical decolonization of the knowledge systems of the Western academy. He is also a founding member of the Backwaters Collective on Metaphysics and Politics (2010-present), which meets annually in Kerala. He shares the sentiments of the scholars, public intellectuals, and activists who are engaged in all these enterprises, which may be described as motivated by “an intellectual concern for the ecology of plural knowledge, a normative concern with cultural survival, and a potential concern with the search for humane futures for the victims of history.”

Between 2007 and 2012, Vinay divided his time between Delhi and Los Angeles. He served as University of California’s Director of the Education Abroad Program in India for 18 months, and while on leave from UCLA in 2010-11 he served as Professor of History at the University of Delhi.

See more at his page here: http://www.history.ucla.edu/faculty/vinay-lal