Ghaliah Fakhoury

Ghaliah Fakhoury (she/her) is a first-generation Arab American taking the next step in her academic journey as part of the Asian American Studies MA program. Her research primarily centers Arab/West Asian diasporic communities in the U.S. As a child of the Arab diaspora and in the wake of 9/11, rather than shying away from her Arab heritage, Ghaliah found herself tightly grasping onto it — specifically through Arab music. Inspired by her own experience, Ghaliah’s research explores how music roots displaced peoples, and music as a connection to self and homeland. Prior to joining the Bruin family, she received her Bachelor of Arts in Sociology and a minor in Ethnic and Women’s Studies/Gender and Sexuality Studies at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. In her free time, Ghaliah enjoys discovering music from around the globe, being out in open spaces, surrounding herself with family and friends, indulging in tasty eats, iced coffee, and savoring moments of joy.

Zach Anderson

Zach Anderson (he/him) is a CHamoru/Pinoy writer and journalist who was born on ‘Amuwu land (Lompoc, CA) and raised on Nisenan land (Sacramento). Before joining the Asian American Studies department, he was a contributor to AsAm News where he covered Pacific Islander communities both on the islands and on the continental United States. He was also the managing editor of the BIPOC literary collective Think in Ink and briefly served as a communications consultant for the 2022 Kylie Taitano congressional campaign. Zach’s research and capstone thesis focuses on the collaboration between Asian American studies and Pasifika studies in critiquing the American Empire. When he is not reading or writing, he enjoys gardening, birding and outdoor grilling. His writing can be found in Eclectica magazine as well as an anthology of new CHamoru literature which was published by the University of Hawaii.

Layhannara Tep

Hi everyone! My name is Layhannara Tep and I was born and raised in Long Beach, California. I am the daughter of Cambodian refugees, an experience that continues to shape my writing. I attended UCLA as an undergraduate and pursued a double major in Asian American Studies and English. After graduation, I pursued my interest in educational equity and worked in student retention at the UCLA Community Programs Office. During my years in Student Affairs, I served as the SEA CLEAR Project Coordinator (UCLA’s Southeast Asian retention project), the Writing Success Program Manager, and as the Retention Advisor. I am currently a full-time graduate student in Asian American Studies at UCLA, where I am working on a creative capstone that merges my interests in the Cambodian diaspora and creative writing. My capstone will culminate in a collection of short stories that centers the Cambodian diasporic experience.

Trinity Gabato

Trinity Gabato (she/her) is a third generation Filipina and Vietnamese American from Alameda, California. She received her Bachelors in Sociology and Film with a minor in Asian American Studies from Claremont Mckenna College. While in the UCLA Asian American Studies program, Trinity hopes to research the ways in which institutional racism, classism, and sexism affects Southeast Asian women who participate in intimate labor. Trinity likes to eat ice cream (Jeni’s is my fave), binge watch reality T.V., and skateboarding on the beach boardwalk! 

Kristi Mai

Kristi Mai (she/her) is a second generation Vietnamese-Chinese American woman from San Gabriel Valley, California. She received her Bachelor of Arts in Asian American Studies and History, with a minor in Labor Studies at UCLA. She is a first-year graduate student in the dual degree program with the Asian American Studies MA and Masters in Social Welfare. Her current research interests are on examining sexual and gender violence in Southeast Asian communities, along with the intersections of abolition and education. In her free time, Kristi enjoys playing video games, experiencing the joys of food with friends, and yoga.

Loubna Qutami

Loubna Qutami is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. Qutami is a former President’s Postdoctoral Fellow from the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley (2018-2020) and received her PhD from the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Riverside (2018). Qutami’s research examines transnational Palestinian youth movements after the 1993 Oslo Accords through the 2011 Arab Uprisings. Her work is based on scholar-activist ethnographic research methods. Qutami’s broader scholarly interests include Palestine, critical refugee studies, the racialization of Arab/Muslim communities in the U.S., settler-colonialism, youth movements, transnationalism and indigenous and Third World Feminism.

Jolie Chea

Jolie Chea is an assistant professor in the Department of Asian American Studies at UCLA. Her research draws from the work of historians, Native, Black, Latinx, and Asian American scholars to produce a narrative that situates the emergence of Southeast Asian refugees from the region formerly known as “French Indochina” to the settler state known as the “United States of America.” Her book manuscript traces a critical genealogy of the “refugee” that does not reinforce or reimpose normative understandings of citizenship and belonging but rather, traces the refugee figure back to a history of global racialized warfare and imperialist state violence, where she argues that the incorporation of the Cambodian refugee figure into the US body politic is an extension of ongoing efforts to discipline and contain radical opposition to a US nation-building project founded on war, racism, genocide, and the colonization of racialized bodies. She has spent two decades working alongside various immigrant, women, and queer youth of color communities, and one decade organizing with prison abolition movements in Los Angeles, where she combines social justice activism and scholarship. She is a former UC President’s postdoctoral fellow at UC Riverside, having prior completed her doctoral work in the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity at USC and a master’s in Asian American Studies at UCLA.

 

Jean-Paul R. Contreras deGuzman

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.

 

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

Mady Thuyein

Mady Thuyein (she/her) is Burmese American and grew up in New Jersey. She received her BA in Psychology from Bard College. She will be beginning her first year of the concurrent Asian American Studies M.A. and Master of Social Welfare program in the fall of 2022.