Jerry Kang

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Please refer to Professor Kang’s official UCLA Faculty Web site: http://www.jerrykang.net/

Jerry Kang is Vice Chancellor for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion.  He is also Professor of Law at UCLA School of Law, Professor of Asian American Studies (by courtesy) at UCLA, and the inaugural Korea Times — Hankook Ilbo Chair in Korean American Studies and Law.

Professor Jerry Kang’s teaching and research interests include civil procedure, race, and communications. On race, he has focused on the nexus between implicit bias and the law, with the goal of advancing a “behavioral realism” that imports new scientific findings from the mind sciences into legal discourse and policymaking. He is also an expert on Asian American communities, and has written about hate crimes, affirmative action, the Japanese American internment, and its lessons for the “War on Terror.” He is a co-author of Race, Rights, and Reparation: The Law and the Japanese American Internment (2d ed. Wolters Kluwer 2013).

On communications, Professor Kang has published on the topics of privacy, pervasive computing, mass media policy, and cyber-race (the techno-social construction of race in cyberspace). He is also the author of Communications Law & Policy: Cases and Materials (4th edition Foundation 2012), a leading casebook in the field.

During law school, Professor Kang was a supervising editor of the Harvard Law Review and Special Assistant to Harvard University’s Advisory Committee on Free Speech. After graduation, he clerked for Judge William A. Norris of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, then worked at the National Telecommunications and Information Administration on cyberspace policy.

He joined UCLA in Fall 1995 and has been recognized for his teaching by being elected Professor of the Year in 1998; receiving the law school’s Rutter Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2007; and being chosen for the highest university-wide distinction, the University Distinguished Teaching Award (The Eby Award for the Art of Teaching) in 2010.  At UCLA, he was founding co-Director of the Concentration for Critical Race Studies, the first program of its kind in American legal education. He is also founding co-Director of PULSE: Program on Understanding Law, Science, and Evidence.  During 2003-05, Prof. Kang was Visiting Professor at both Harvard Law School and Georgetown Law Center.  During the 2013-14 academic year, he was in residence at the Straus Institute for the Advanced Study of Law & Justice at NYU School of Law as a Straus Fellow as well as the David M. Friedman Fellow.

Prof. Kang is a member of the American Law Institute, has chaired the American Association of Law School’s Section on Defamation and Privacy, has served on the Board of Directors of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, and has received numerous awards including the World Technology Award for Law and the Vice President’s “Hammer Award” for Reinventing Government.

Wyatt Wu

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Wyatt Wu is an MA student in the Asian American Studies Department. He was born and raised in the San Gabriel Valley and currently works as a nonfiction filmmaker and video editor. He received his Bachelor’s degree in documentary journalism at the University of Missouri. As a proud Taiwanese American, Wyatt hopes to be able to take his studies and research as an AAS student at UCLA to further progress the Asian American community through filmmaking. Prior to pursuing his masters degree, Wyatt worked as a video editor and producer for Marketplace, Little Dot Studios, Jubilee Media and the LA Phil.

Lucy Mae San Pablo Burns

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L MSP Burns is an Associate Professor in the Asian American Studies Department at UCLA, a land grant institution in the homeland of the Gabrielino/Tongva peoples.

Areas of Interest
Burns’s writings include Puro Arte: Filipinos on the Stages of Global Empire (NYU Press, 2014 Outstanding Book Award in Cultural Studies by the Asian American Studies Association) and the co-edited anthology California Dreaming: Place and Movement in Asian American Imaginary (2020, University of Hawai’i Press). Burns is working on a second monograph, Asian American Elsewheres.

As a dramaturg, Burns has collaborated with BIPOC inter/multidisciplinary theater- and dance-makers David Rousseve/REALITY; Leilani Chan/TeAda Productions; Priya Srinivasan; Jay Carlon; and R. Zamora Linmark.

Burns is also a member of a research group consisting of artists, scholars, and art professionals who have been conducting research and conversations about the impact of COVID-19 closures and the COVID-19 pandemic on BIPOC theater artists and organizations. Information about this project may be found here: https://www.bipoctheatresurveys.com/.

Thu-hương Nguyễn-võ

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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.

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.

Kyeyoung Park

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.