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/

Paul Ong

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Areas of Interest

Professor Ong has done research on the labor market status of minorities and immigrants, displaced high-tech workers, work and welfare and transportation access. He is currently engaged in several projects, including studies on the effects of neighborhood economies on welfare and work, community economic development in minority communities, and the labor market for healthcare workers.

Previous research projects have included studies of the impact of defense cuts on California’s once-dominant aerospace industry, the impact of immigration on the employment status of young African Americans, and the influence of car ownership and subsidized housing on welfare usage. He was co-author of a widely reported 1994 study on Asian Pacific Americans, which challenged the popular stereotype of Asians as the country’s “model minority” by showing they are just as likely as other groups to be impoverished. Dr. Ong has served as an advisor to the U.S. Bureau of the Census, and to the California Department of Social Services and the state Department of Employment Development, as well as the Wellness Foundation and the South Coast Air.

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

Jinqi Ling

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Jinqi Ling’s teaching and research focus on Asian American literary studies as a discourse constructed out of its engagement with and articulation through a specific set of historical contingencies and contexts. He is particularly interested in exploring the referential or cognitive function of this literature, as well as the conditions of its production and reproduction open to symptomatic reading and ideological transcoding. His research method is chiefly informed by versions of Russian Formalism and, to a lesser extent, of structuralism and poststructuralism, with an emphasis on historicized aesthetics and formally motivated cultural criticism.

He is the author of three monographs: Narrating Nationalisms: Ideology and Form in Asian American Literature (Oxford UP, 1998); Across Meridians: History and Figuration in Karen Tei Yamashita’s Transnational Novels (Stanford UP, 2012); and Asian American Literature (Bloomsbury’s essential criticism series, 2022). He is currently working on an article titled “Open Realist Genre, Riven Humanism: Rehistoricizing Yanghill Kang’s East Goes West,” and a book manuscript titled “The Experimental Temper: Early Asian American Prose Fiction and Its Formal Search, 1937-1968.”

Areas of Interest

Critical theory; Asian American literature; genre studies; and representational concerns at the intersection between realism and high modernism/early postmodernism

Marjorie Kagawa-Singer

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Dr. Marjorie Kagawa-Singer is a professor at the UCLA School of Public Health and Asian American Studies Center. Presently her research focuses on developing standards of cultural competence in health care research and practice and reducing disparities in health outcomes for populations of color, especially Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians, and other Pacific Islanders. Dr. Kagawa-Singer serves on multiple local, state, and national committees involved with issues of ethnicity and health care. She has published, lectured nationally and internationally, and taught extensively on issues in cross-cultural health care, cancer, pain, grief and bereavement, end of life decision-making, and quality of life. She also serves as a consultant to community groups to reach underserved populations with cancer education and services.

Areas of Interest

Health disparities in cancer control among diverse ethnic populations; development of cross-culturally valid concepts and measures to expand existing behavior theories in PH using qualitative research methods, and applied through intervention studies primarily in the Asian American communities. Cultural competency training for health professionals, doctor/patient communication, and end-of-life care in multicultural populations.

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.

Victor Bascara

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Victor Bascara is Associate Professor in the UCLA Department of Asian American Studies.  He was previously Associate Professor of Asian American Studies and English at the University of Wisconsin – Madison.  He received his doctorate from the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.  His research examines various manifestations of formal and informal colonialism, with a particular emphasis on Asian American cultural politics.  His current research includes a comparative study of the early 20th-century histories of the Universities of Puerto Rico, Hawai’i, and the Philippines, and he is completing a monograph on the relationship between U.S. imperialism and isolationism in the interwar period (c. 1919-1941).  He is co-editing, with Prof. Lisa Nakamura (U. of Michigan – Ann Arbor), a special issue of Amerasia Journal called “Asian American Cultural Politics Across Platforms:  Literature, Film, New Media, and Beyond.”

Recent courses he has taught include Asian American literature and culture (graduate and undergraduate), contemporary Asian American communities, Asian Americans and war, Filipino American experience, technology and new social movements, empire and sexuality, new media and the new world order, cultural politics of movements, and research methodologies.

He has also served as faculty advisor for student-initiated courses on Samahang Pilipino Cultural Night, Filipino American student activism, and Pacific Islander education and retention. He has served as Undergraduate Advisor, Graduate Advisor, and Vice Chair for the Asian American Studies Department.  And he has also done service for the Asian American Studies Center, the Center for the Study of Women, the Center for Southeast Asian Studies, and other units at UCLA.  He is part of an ongoing, multi-campus, and international collaborative initiative (co-run with UCLA Profs. Keith Camacho and Elizabeth DeLoughrey) on legacies of Pacific Island militarization, including a symposium at the University of the South Pacific in Suva, Fiji, in summer 2013.