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.
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’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
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 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.
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 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.
Kyeyoung Park 박계영 is a Professor of Anthropology and Asian American Studies at UCLA.
I am a sociocultural anthropologist. The question of inequality, my life-long scholastic interest, is naturally tied to questions of social justice, social change, and social movement. Accordingly, I heavily focus on culture in motion and the migration of people. Particularly I concentrate on cases of displaced people and their relation to structures of political economy and critical race and comparative ethnic studies and now, in a broad sense, their relationship to transnationalism and globalization. I am also the author of a book, LA Rising: Korean Relations with Blacks and Latinos after Civil Unrest (2019), published by Lexington Books. LA Rising develops neo-Marxist scholarship with intersectional analysis by examining multi-racial/ethnic tensions in South Central LA. I define axes of inequality in the U.S. as they relate to race, citizenship, class, and culture. My main objective is to explore how these axes of inequality have made an indelible impact on racial minorities and their relationship with each other.
My first book, The Korean American Dream: Immigrants and Small Business in New York City (1997), by Cornell University Press, is the winner of the Association for Asian American Studies’ Book Award. This book examined why Koreans gravitate to small businesses and demonstrated how the structural imperatives of this process lead to transformations of concepts around gender, kinship, family, politics, and religion, and, more broadly, the transformation of cultural beliefs and ideologies. Besides these two monographs, I have co-written and co-edited three more books: Korean Americans’ ethnic relationship in Los Angeles; Korean American Economy; 태평양을 넘어서: 글로벌시대 재미한인의 삶과 활동 (Cross the Pacific: The Lives of Korean Americans and their Socio-Political Engagement in the Global Age). In addition, I edited/co-edited three special issues of peer-reviewed journals: Second Generation Asian Americans’ Ethnic Identity (Amerasia Journal 1999) and How Do Asian Americans Create Places? Los Angeles and Beyond (Amerasia Journal 2008); Emigration and Immigration: The Case of Korea (Urban anthropology 2014). My current research projects are about the Korean immigrant communities in Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay and the second generation Korean American Transnationalism. I was a Visiting Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University (1998-99) and a fellow at the Russell Sage Foundation (1997-98). I also served on the National Advisory Board of a multi-year national public education project sponsored by the American Anthropological Association and funded by NSF and the Ford Foundation on Race and Human Variation.
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.
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.
