Ghaliah Fakhoury

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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

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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

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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

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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! 

Loubna Qutami

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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

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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

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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.

 

Benjamin K.P. Woo

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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

Cindy Sangalang

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Cindy C. Sangalang, PhD, MSW is an assistant professor of Asian American Studies and Social Welfare at UCLA. Drawing on theory and knowledge across disciplines, her program of research examines how race, migration, and culture intersect to shape health and well-being in immigrant and refugee communities, with a focus on Southeast Asian youth and their families. A primary concern involves understanding developmental and health-related effects of racism and war- and migration-related traumas. These scholarly commitments are fueled by a broader goal of informing interventions that promote social justice and health equity.

Professor Sangalang has been a principal investigator on research funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA). She earned her Ph.D. and Masters in Social Welfare from UCLA and trained as a postdoctoral fellow in health disparities research at Arizona State University. Previously she was on the faculty in Social Work at Arizona State University and California State University, Los Angeles.

Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi

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Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi is an associate professor of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (Tovaangar). Her interdisciplinary research engages critical refugee studies, comparative ethnic studies, Global Asias, and transpacific studies. Dr. Gandhi’s first book, Archipelago of Resettlement: Vietnamese Refugee Settlers and Decolonization across Guam and Israel-Palestine (University of California Press, 2022), was awarded the 2025 ACLS Open Access Book Prize in History. It examines Vietnamese refugee resettlement in Guam and Israel-Palestine as a means to trace two forms of critical geography: first, archipelagos of empire — how the Vietnam War is linked to US military build-up in Guam and unwavering support of Israel; and second, corresponding archipelagos of resistance — how Chamorro decolonization efforts and Palestinian liberation struggles are connected via the Vietnamese refugee figure. This project analyzes what she calls the “refugee settler condition”: the vexed positionality of refugee subjects whose very condition of political legibility via citizenship is predicated upon the unjust dispossession of an Indigenous population. Dr. Gandhi is the co-editor with Vinh Nguyen of The Routledge Handbook of Refugee Narratives (Routledge, 2023). She is currently working on a second book project which revisits Gramsci’s “southern question” by constellating the southern spaces of South Korea, South Vietnam, and the US South during the Cold War and its afterlives. In addition to writing, Dr. Gandhi is committed to multimedia public scholarship. She hosts a podcast, Distorted Footprints, through her Critical Refugee Studies class. Research on Vietnam-Guam connections during the Vietnam War and Operation New Life can be found on the Remembering Saigon public history website. You can also check out Dr. Gandhi’s films on Vimeo.