Jean-Paul R. Contreras deGuzman

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Dr. deGuzman is an historian of 20th century America with a particular focus on comparative racialization, urban history, Asian Americans, and Los Angeles. His book project, tentatively entitled A Touch of Danger: Southern California’s San Fernando Valley and the Racial Politics of An American Dream, explores how communities of color claimed and contested that iconic American space. The rest of his publications focus on three major areas — comparative race studies of Los Angeles, Asian American communities, and the (inter)discipline of Asian American Studies — and cover topics as varied as the genesis of boba cafes, student activism for Asian American Studies, the evolution of Shin Buddhism in Los Angeles, and various flash points in San Fernando Valley history (from Cold War civil rights activism to the secession movement to the place-based politics of historical memory and preservation).

A past recipient of the UCLA Distinguished Teaching Award, Dr. deGuzman’s pedagogy focuses on project-based learning and requires students to become engaged scholars adept at using historical analysis to understand themselves and the worlds around them. In addition to executing traditional research papers, his students have excavated and built a digital archive of a nearly century-old local Buddhist temple, created an ongoing catalogue of interethnic spaces in Los Angeles on Instagram, and, several successive Asian American history “pop-up” museums in the rotunda of Powell Library. Beyond the Asian American Studies Department, Dr. deGuzman regularly teaches a seminar on race, power, and Los Angeles in the Interracial Dynamics GE Cluster. He is also on the faculty of Windward School in Mar Vista where his greatest honor was getting selected to compete in the Windward Improv Troupe (W!T) annual student/faculty match.

Committed to public history, Dr. deGuzman helped found the Tuna Canyon Detention Station Coalition, a network of civil rights activists, educators, descendants, and residents focused on the preservation of that World War II-era alien detention camp in Sunland-Tujunga. He has been an advisor to the L.A. Office of Historic Preservation and is a member of the archives and historic preservation committee of the Buddhist Churches of America, the oldest and largest Buddhist organization in the U.S.

Dr. deGuzman is an alumnus of the department having completed his M.A. thesis, portions of which were published in Adolescent Behavior Research Studies, under the direction of the late Don T. Nakanishi and Valerie J. Matsumoto.

 

Andrew Do

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Andrew H. Do, MPH, is a summer lecturer in the Asian American Studies department, where he teaches Asian American Healthcare Issues.  Andrew is also a regular guest lecturer at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health, lecturing on accounting, financial management, and information technology in healthcare.  An active alumni, he currently serves on the Board of Directors for the UCLA Health Policy and Management Alumni Association (HPMAA) and is a faculty advisor for The Liver Project at UCLA, a student initiative to fight liver disease and liver cancer by collaborating with nonprofits, schools, and other community organizations to perform para-medical outreach including education, fundraising, and clinical volunteering.

Andrew earned his Masters in Public Health (MPH), Healthcare Management, from the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health. He is a double Bruin, also completing his undergraduate degree at UCLA in Political Science (BA) with double minors in Public Health and Asian American Studies.

Andrew works full time as the Executive Consultant for Kaiser Permanente’s Medical Group Operations in Southern California.  In this role, he acts as an advisor by structuring operational issues for resolution and leading the planning, management, and execution of key business processes associated with the Southern California Permanente Medical Group executive team, including performance management, strategic planning, communications, and tactical initiatives.

Lily Anne Welty Tamai

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Lily Anne Welty Tamai earned her doctorate in History from the University of California Santa Barbara. She conducted research in Japan and in Okinawa as a Fulbright Graduate Research Fellow and was also a Ford Foundation Fellow. Her forthcoming book titled, Military Industrial Intimacy: Mixed-race American Japanese, Eugenics and Transnational Identities, documents the history of mixed-race American Japanese and American Okinawans born after World War II and raised during the post-war period. Dr. Tamai was formerly the Curator of History at the Japanese American National Museum and currently serves on the U.S. Census Bureau National Advisory Committee on Racial, Ethnic, and Other Populations. At UCLA she teaches Asian American Studies 20, 20W, 30W, 115, 170, and 187C (Multiracial and Multiethnic Asian Americans).

Dr. Tamai has done service for the UCLA Mixed Student Union and the UCLA Southeast Asian Admit Program. She also serves on the Japanese American Citizens League Ventura County chapter board, and as a consultant for the Ventura County Maternal Mental Health Coalition. She has previously been a consultant for Wowow Network, NHK, Fuji TV, Yumiuri Shinbun, and Madama Butterfly, by Puccini for the The Norwegian Opera (Den Norske Operaen). She is currently working on articles about the historic preservation of a segregated Japanese cemetery in Ventura County, California and another on race in the Harry Potter series.

Kelly Fong

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Kelly N. Fong is a fifth-generation Chinese American, historical archaeologist, and Asian American Studies scholar.  Her work bridges her passion for Asian American social histories, family histories, and historical archaeology to examine everyday life through materials and memories left behind.  Her past research examined the 20th-century Chinese American community in Isleton Chinatown, a rural, agricultural and multiracial community in the Sacramento Delta. Her next project explores the creation of a Chinese America through foodways, particularly focusing on home-style cooking through the lens of community cookbooks.  She is currently a contingent faculty member in Asian American Studies who has taught at UCLA, California State University, Northridge and Claremont Graduate University.