Thu-hương Nguyễn-võ

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Nguyễn-võ Thu-hương holds a split appointment in Asian Languages and Cultures, and Asian American Studies. Her current book, Almost Futures: Sovereignty and Refuge at World’s End (2024), looks to the people who pay the heaviest price exacted by war and capitalist globalization—particularly Vietnamese citizens and refugees—for glimpses of ways to exist in catastrophes. Her other publications explore the politics of time in futurist visions from the (inter)colonial moment to the present in cultural works by Indochinese, Vietnamese, African American, and other artists, writers, and activists. She teaches graduate seminars in critical theory and undergraduate courses in Vietnamese and Vietnamese American politics and culture.

Areas of Interest

Alternative epistemologies, time, and the human in relation to necroeconomics and necropolitics. Futurist visions at intercolonial moments in early 20th century, the 1960s, and after. Intersections between Vietnamese and Black Studies.

Natalie Masuoka

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Her research interests include racial and ethnic politics, immigration, political behavior and public opinion. Her first book, The Politics of Belonging: Race, Public Opinion and Immigration (co-authored with Jane Junn) examines how and why whites, blacks, Asian Americans and Latinos view immigration and immigrants in systematically different ways.  This book was the winner of the 2014 Ralph Bunche Award by the American Political Science Association.  Her second book, Multiracial Identity and Racial Politics in the United States, explores the rise of Americans who self-identify as mixed race or multiracial and the impact on politics. This book was recognized as the best book in political behavior by the Race, Ethnicity and Politics Section of the American Political Science Association. Professor Masuoka received her Ph.D. and M.A. from University of California, Irvine and a B.A. from CSU Long Beach. Before joining UCLA she taught at Tufts University and Duke University.

David K. Yoo

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David K. Yoo is Professor of Asian American Studies and History, and Vice Provost, Institute of American Cultures. http://www.iac.ucla.edu/

Min Zhou

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Dr. Min Zhou is Distinguished Professor of Sociology & Asian American Studies, Walter and Shirley Wang Endowed Chair in U.S.-China Relations & Communications, and Director of the UCLA Asia Pacific Center. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She currently serves on the UCLA Council on Academic Personnel (CAP), the Executive Committee of Sociological Research Association (SRA), and the Board of the International Society for the Study of Chinese Overseas (ISSCO). She was the founding chair of UCLA Asian American Studies Department (2001-05). Between 2013 and 2016, she took a leave of absence to be the Tan Lark Sye Chair Professor, Head of Sociology Division, and Director of the Chinese Heritage Centre, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.

Dr. Zhou is an internationally renowned scholar in the areas of migration and development, race and ethnicity, Chinese diaspora studies, urban sociology, and the sociology of Asia and Asian America, and has published 20 books and more than 230 journal articles and book chapters in these areas. She is the author of Chinatown: The Socioeconomic Potential of an Urban Enclave (1992), Contemporary Chinese America: Immigration, Ethnicity, and Community Transformation (2009), and The Accidental Sociologist in Asian American Studies (2011); co-author of Growing up American: How Vietnamese Children Adapt to Life in the United States(with Bankston, 1998), The Asian American Achievement Paradox (with Lee, 2015), and The Rise of the New Second Generation (with Bankston, 2016); editor of Contemporary Chinese Diasporas (2007); and co-editor of Asian American Youth (with Lee, 2004), Contemporary Asian America (with Gatewood, 1st ed. 2000, 2nd ed. 2007; with Ocampo, 3rd ed. 2016), and Beyond Economic Migration: Historical, Social, and Political Factors in US Immigration (eds., with Mahmud, 2023).

Editorial Boards

  • Editorial Board, Annual Review of Sociology, 2023-2027
  • Editorial Board, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 2014-present
  • Editorial Board, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 2014-present
  • Co-Editor-in-Chief, Journal of Chinese Overseas (2014-2022)

Renee Tajima-Peña

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Professor Renee Tajima-Peña is Professor of Asian American Studies, Director of the Center for EthnoCommunications and holder of the Alumni and Friends of Japanese American Ancestry Endowed Chair. She is an Academy Award-nominated documentary filmmaker who has chronicled the Asian American experience through films such as Who Killed Vincent Chin? and My America…or Honk if You Love Buddha, Asian Americans, the first-ever 5-hour docuseries on the Asian American experience that aired on PBS in 2020.

Her other films on themes of immigration, race, ethnicity, gender and social justice include The Best Hotel on Skid Row, Calavera Highway, Skate Manzanar, Labor Women, and No Más Bebés. Tajima-Peña’s latest production is the May 19 Project which she co-founded/executive produced with Jeff Chang in collaboration with independent filmmakers across the US. The May 19 Project is a social media campaign that traces the legacy of Asian American Pacific Islander solidarity with other communities through fourteen short videos and social media content.

Her online media projects explore the history of Japanese American incarceration and resistance. Building History 3.0 is an interactive documentary and video game-based learning project and is supported by the National Parks Service and the California Civil Liberties Public Education Fund. Tajima-Peña is co-founder and co-producer of the Nikkei Democracy Project, a multi-generational multi-media collective that uses the power of the Japanese American imprisonment story to expose current threats to Constitutional rights.

Tajima-Peña’s work has screened at the Cannes Film Festival, Hong Kong Film Festival, New York Film Festival, Sundance Film Festival, and the Whitney Biennial, and has been broadcast throughout the US and abroad. She has been honored with two Peabody Awards, the Alpert Award in the Arts, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the United States Artists Broad Fellowship, and a Dupont-Columbia University Award.

Tajima-Peña has been deeply involved in the Asian American independent film community as an activist, writer and filmmaker. She was the director of Asian Cine-Vision in New York , and active in the founding of the Center for Asian American Media (formerly NAATA) and A-Doc/Asian American Documentary Network. During he time as a regular contributor to The Village Voice, she was the only Asian American woman film critic writing for a national publication. She was also a cultural commentator for National Public Radio and editor of Bridge: Asian American Perspectives.

Website:

https://www.reneetajimapena.com/

Valerie Matsumoto

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Valerie J. Matsumoto is a Professor in the Department of History and the Department of Asian American Studies. In July 2017 she was appointed to the George and Sakaye Aratani Endowed Chair on the Japanese American Incarceration, Redress, and Community.

Purnima Mankekar

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Areas of Interest

Feminist Media Studies, Post-9/11Public Cultures, Affect Theories, Outsourcing and Information Technology, Transnational Cultural Studies; South Asian America, South Asia

Grace Kyungwon Hong

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Grace Kyungwon Hong is Professor of Asian American Studies at UCLA; she also holds a joint appointment in Gender Studies. She is also currently the Director of the Center for the Study of Women. Her research focuses on women of color feminism as an epistemological critique of, and alternative to, Western liberal humanism and racial capitalism, particularly as they manifest as contemporary neoliberalism.

She is the author of Death Beyond Disavowal: The Impossible Politics of Difference (University of Minnesota Press, 2015) which won the Association for Asian American Studies Cultural Studies book prize, and The Ruptures of American Capital:  Women of Color Feminism and the Cultures of Immigrant Labor (University of Minnesota Press, 2006). She is the co-editor (with Roderick Ferguson) of Strange Affinities:  The Gender and Sexual Politics of Comparative Racialization (Duke University Press, 2011).  She is the co-editor (also with Roderick Ferguson) of the Difference Incorporated book series at the University of Minnesota Press.

Keith L. Camacho

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Professor Camacho received his training in the anthropology, literature, and history of the Pacific Islands at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. He has also held research appointments in ethnic studies, gender studies, and native studies at the Australian National University, the University of Canterbury, the University of Illinois, and the University of Sydney. From 2014 to 2018, Professor Camacho then served as the Senior Editor of Amerasia Journal. His research has mainly focused on Chamorro cultural and historical politics, as well as American and Japanese colonialisms and militarisms more generally. Presently, Professor Camacho is studying Samoan youth violence and justice in Auckland, Aotearoa, and Los Angeles, California.