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latest news
ASE Achievements & Core AccomplishmentsFebruary 2, 2011 Monika Langarica, an American Studies and Ethnicity major, has been selected to receive a 2011 Phi Kappa Phi Student Recognition Award. These awards will be presented at the 30th Annual Academic Honors Convocation on April 5th, 2011, at 5 p.m. at Town and Gown. The selection committee found her work particularly praiseworthy from among the large number of submissions received. In fact, she is the only undergraduate in the entire university to be honored. Monika's paper is entitled “School Counselors and Policy Mediation: Understanding and Affecting Urban Student Outcomes.” She wrote the paper last year under the direction of Professor Ricardo Ramirez. Monica, who is currently enrolled in AMST 498: The Senior Seminar, plans to attend law school after graduating from USC. Please join us in congratulating Monika on this extraordinary achievement! Thanks!
May 2010
ASE FACULTY Josh Kun delivered the 7th annual Harold I. Lee Lecture on April 25, 2010, entitled “That Old Black Magic: The Music of Black-Jewish Relations.” This lecture explored the myriad ways Jews and African-Americans have coalesced, clashed, mobilized, and struggled with each other through a century's worth of extraordinary and fascinating performances that find Jews performing black music and African-Americans performing Jewish music. Kun explored influence and exploitation, exchange and theft-everything from black performers like Slim Galliard singing about bagels and matzoh balls and Cab Calloway mixing Yiddish into his hepcat dictionary of jive to Sonny Berman making 40s bebop he called ''Beautiful Jewish Music," Johnny Mathis singing "Kol Nidre," and Aretha Franklin doing a 60s take on "Swanee." The lecture is partly drawn from research supported by the Casden Institute that is featured on the 2010 music compilation Black Sabbath: A Secret History of Black-Jewish Relations, out soon from the Idelsohn Society of Musical Preservation. Viet Nguyen published two short stories,“Arthur Arellano” inNarrative 11 (Spring 2010): 27-40 and“The War Years” inTriQuarterly 135/136 (Winter 2009/Spring 2010): 79-93. He received a grant from the Center for Excellence in Teaching'sFund for Innovative Undergraduate Teaching, which he will use to develop a multimedia Arts and Letters course on the American War in Viet Nam for Spring 2011. With Janet Hoskins, he received aResearch Cluster Grant from the Center for International Studies, and with Jane Iwamura and Sumi Pendakur, he received anArts and Humanities Initiative Grant to stage "State of the Word: Asian American Spoken Word" with nationally renowned performers Bao Phi, Kelly Tsai, and D'Lo on April 2, 2011. With Janet Hoskins, he organized a conference on “Transpacific Studies: Homelands, Diasporas, and the Movement of Populations” that brought seventeen international and national faculty speakers to USC this past April. Hoskins and Nguyen also organized a forum on “Transpacific Public Culture" in April. Most recently, he co-organized and was the master of ceremonies for “Outspoken: Vietnamese Poets of the Diaspora II" at Fort Mason, San Francisco on April 24, sponsored by the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network and the Friends of the San Francisco Public Library. Manuel Pastor has secured several grants in 2010, including one from The California Endowment called “Counting on Change: Assessing the Ripple Effects of TCE’s Census Initiative,” which looks at the movement-building implications of groups working together on the Census count; one from Public Interest Projects, “Building Alliance Capacity,” which looks at model movement-building efforts around the country; another from the Evelyn and Walter Haas, Jr. Fund called “Honest Conversation, Unusual Allies, and New Frameworks: Research and Action to Build Understanding and Forge Ties in African-American and Immigrant Communities”; and finally one from the Hewlett Foundation entitled “Broadening Constituencies and Reshaping Policy for Climate Justice in California.” Forthcoming in June 2010 is Uncommon Common Ground: Race and America’s Future, a book co-authored with Angela Glover Blackwell and Stewart Kwoh which is an extensive revision of a 2002 volume with a similar name. Published on-line (and soon in hard copy) this spring was "The Role of Community Technology Centers in Youth Skill-Building and Empowerment" (with Rebecca London, Lisa Servon, Rachel Rosner, and Antwuan Wallace) in Youth and Society. He also completed several working papers, including “Reducing Poverty and Economic Distress After ARRA: Potential Roles for Place-Conscious Strategies” (with Margery Turner, Urban Institute; see http://www.urban.org/issues/reducing-poverty-economic-distress.cfm to download), and “Breaking the Bank / (Re)Making the Bank: America’s Financial Crisis and the Implications for Sustainable Advocacy for Fair Credit and Fair Banking” prepared for the Kirwan Institute (with Rhonda Ortiz and Vanessa Carter; available at http://kirwaninstitute.org/research/projects/future-of-fair-housing.php ) Finally, Pastor worked with others on two reports, Minding the Climate Gap: What’s at Stake if California’s Climate Law is Done Right and Right Away (with Rachel Morello-Frosch, James Sadd, and Justin Scoggins), released by the USC Program for Environmental and Regional Equity (PERE) in April, and The Economic Benefits of Immigrant Authorization in California (with Justin Scoggins, Jennifer Tran, and Rhonda Ortiz) released by USC’s Center for the Study of Immigrant Integration in January. During the 2010-2011 academic year, Shana Redmond will be a Visiting Scholar in the James Weldon Johnson Institute for Advanced Interdisciplinary Studies at Emory University. Next year she will also use her recently awarded Advancing Scholarship in the Humanities and Social Sciences (ASHSS) fellowship to pursue research in South Africa. In March she was the invited keynote and moderator at the annual Erskine Peters Symposium, entitled “Reconstructing the Image of Michael Jackson,” through the department of Africana Studies at the University of Notre Dame. In April she presented a paper entitled, “Bandung Holograms: Paul Robeson on Tape” at the Experience Music Project conference in Seattle, along with colleagues Josh Kun and Karen Tongson. One week later she was an invited participant at the School Of Unlimited Learning (SOUL) workshop in the department of Black Studies at UCSB where she presented a draft of her article in progress on Paul Robeson’s sound migrations." George J. Sánchez has published “Edward R. Roybal and the Politics of Multiracialism” in the Southern California Quarterly 92:1 (Spring 2010). ASE Ph.D. STUDENTSMichelle Commander has accepted a tenure-track faculty position as an Assistant Professor of Africana Studies and English at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville.
Perla Guerrero has received a Smithsonian Latino Postdoctoral Fellowship for 2010-2011.
Margaret Salazar has received a Smithsonian Latino Postdoctoral Fellowship for 2010-2011. Lata Murti has been hired by The Claremont Colleges to teach a course on South Asian American Experiences in Fall 2010. In early April, she presented a chapter from her dissertation on a panel session she convened for the 2010 Association of Asian American Studies meeting. Another chapter from her dissertation has been accepted for presentation at a paper session on work and occupations at the annual American Sociological Association meeting, August 2010. Anton Smith will be graduating from ASE in May. Also, this fall he will begin a three-year appointment as a Teaching Fellow in the American Cultures StudiesProgram at Loyola Marymount University.
Abigail Rosas has received a Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellowship for 2010-2011 to support her dissertation research and writing. In addition, Abigail was selected by the Organization of American Historians (OAH) to receive the 2010 Huggins-Quarles Award, which is given annually to a graduate student of color at the dissertation research stage of their Ph.D. program. She was presented with the award in Washington, D.C. on April 10th, during the 103rd Annual Meeting of the organization. Celeste Menchaca has received a Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship to support her Ph.D. graduate education for an additional three years. Both these Ford Fellowships raises the number of Ford Fellowships in the ASE program to twelve (12) over the nine years since the Ph.D. program was started, the largest number awarded in any graduate program in any field in the nation.
Laura Fugikawa has received a Dissertation Research and Writing Award of $3500 from USC College for Summer 2010. Micaela Smith has received an International Field Research Award for $3000 from USC College for Summer 2010. Orlando Serrano has received a Diversity Enhancement Summer Stipend Award of $3,000 from USC College for Summer 2010. Thang Dao has received a Diversity Enhancement Summer Stipend Award of $3,000 from USC College for Summer 2010. Gretel Vera Rosas received a Wallis Annenberg Fellowship for $25,000 from USC College for 2010-2011. She has also received a Visual Studies Graduate Certificate summer funding award for $750. Tasneem Siddiqui received a Wallis Annenberg Fellowship for $25,000 from USC College for 2010-2011.
ASE DOCTORAL GRADUATES Laura Barraclough (Ph.D. 2006) received a Franklin Research Grant from the American Philosophical Society to conduct archival research in Los Angeles this summer for her new research project: "The Contested Cowboy: Charros, Charreria, and the Racialization of Mexican Americans in the US West." Her first book, Making the San Fernando Valley: Rural Landscape, Urban Development, and White Privilege, (a major revision of her ASE dissertation), will be published in October 2010 by the University of Georgia Press. In addition, she will publish "Reflections on Teaching Prison Abolition" in The Radical Teacher's summer 2010 issue, which is a special issue on prison abolition. She reports that she is doing great and loves Kalamazoo, Michigan!
Wendy Cheng (Ph.D. 2009) has accepted a position as assistant professor in the new School of Social Transformation at Arizona State University, with a joint appointment in Asian Pacific American Studies and Justice & Social Inquiry.
Emily Hobson (Ph.D. 2009) has accepted a two-year College Distinguished Teaching Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Southern California, where she will be teaching AMST 200 and AMST 206 in Fall term 2010. She was also offered (but turned down) a postdoctoral fellowship for 2010-11 at the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis. Emily co-facilitated a workshop on "Centering Race in Introductory Women's, Gender, & Sexuality Studies Courses," at the "Teaching Race & Gender Beyond Diversity" conference held this May at the University of Oregon. That conference was organized by ASE alum Dan HoSang. She presented my work in April at Cal State LA's "Independent Visions" series sponsored by CSULA's Center for the Study of Genders & Sexualities, Latin American Studies, and the Cross Cultural Center, and presented at ASA in fall and at AHA in January. ASE UNDERGRADUATE MAJORS/MINORS During the summer of 2010, Shamell Bell, ASE honors student, will be a fellow with the Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) program at Yale University. She is also the Valedictorian of Black graduation this year.
ASE UNDERGRADUATE ALUMNI Melva G. Alvarez (ASE ’2001) has been selected as an awardee to be recognized as a “La Opinión Mujer Destacada.” La Opinion is celebrating their 4th annual Mujeres Destacadas Editorial Series & Award Recognition celebrating 30 remarkable Southern California Latina women in the following categories: Community, Leadership, Education, Business/Technology, Arts & Culture and Health. Melva received the award for Education based on her work with under-represented high school students entering community college. She is the MESA Program Coordinator for outreach and recruitment for Pasadena City College.
February 2010
ASE FACULTY Amon Emeka published “Race and Unemployment Amidst the New Diversity: More Evidence of a Black/Non-Black Divide” in Race and Social Problems last fall 2009. Janet Hoskins became affiliated with American Studies and Ethnicity just this semester, but reports that this academic year is the second year of a $245,000 NSF grant on "Vietnamese Indigenous religions in Transnational Perspective" of which she is the sole PI. She also recently received word that she would get $28,000 in supplemental funding to use in fall 2010 for another field trip to Vietnam. She also published two articles in peer-reviewed journals: “When the Sun Rises: A Toraja Priest” in Visual Anthropology v. 22 (2&3): p. 242-244 (2009); and “Seeing Syncretism as Visual Blasphemy: Critical Eyes on Caodai Religious Architecture” in Material Religion 6(1) pp. 30-59 (2010). Two other articles appeared in edited collections: “The Camera as Global Vampire: Photography in Remote Indonesia and Elsewhere” in Mike Robinson and David Picard, ed. pp. 153-171. The Framed World: Tourism, Tourists and Photography (Hants, U.K.: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd., 2009); and “Can a Hierarchical Religion Survive Without Its Center? Caodaism, Colonialism and Exile” in Hierarchy: Persistence and Transformation of Social Formations, Knut Rio and Olaf Smedal, eds. pp. 113-141 (London: Berghahn Books, 2009). Three ethnographic documentaries which she researched, wrote, produced and co-directed are now distributed by Documentary Educational Resources (www.der.org). Their titles are "The Left Eye of God: Caodaism Travels from Vietnam to California", "Horses of Life and Death" and "Feast in Dream Village". George J. Sánchez delivered the keynote address for a symposium-reception for “The Boyle Heights Heritage Joint Initiative,” a joint project sponsored by the Consulate Generals of Israel, Japan and Mexico, in Los Angeles in February at the Tateuchi Democracy Forum at the Japanese American National Museum. He also spoke, along with John Carlos Rowe, at the a conference on “Transnational U.S. Studies” at UC Riverside in honor of the late Emory Elliott. Finally, he has published “Disposable People, Expendable Neighborhoods: Repatriation, Internment, and Other Population Removals,” in A Companion to Los Angeles, eds. William Deverell and Greg Hise (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010). ASE Ph.D. STUDENTS Lata Murti submitted a full draft of her dissertation to her committee co-chairs on the morning of Thursday, January 28. (Her defense is scheduled for Thursday, March 4). The afternoon of Thursday, January 28, UCLA's Department of Asian American Studies asked her to teach a Summer 2010 course she had proposed to them (on Asian American Professionals). Lata will not soon forget this late January date. And she hopes that the ASE community will forgive her for temporarily being a Bruin. Abigail Rosas was awarded the 2010 Organization of American Historian's Nathan Huggins-Benjamin Quarles Award for dissertation research. She was also a finalist for the 2010 Woodrow Wilson Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship in Women’s Studies.
Anthony Sparks has been nominated as a Producer for a 2010 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Television Drama. This is Anthony's 2nd Image Award nomination, having been previously nominated as a Drama Writer in 2008. Anthony is also finishing up a stint as the Curator for a month long Black History Month Arts Festival and as the Chairperson for a local and global community service drive based at the Pilgrim School in Los Angeles. The festival featured performances by the international hit show Stomp and the acclaimed Spirit Chorale of Los Angeles, the exhibition of a local community created Black History museum, and his service drive collected over 2,500 pairs of shoes for Haiti.
ASE DOCTORAL GRADUATES Nicole Hodges Persley reports that life at the University of Kansas (where she is an Assistant Professor of Theater) is going extremely well. Her courses received the highest ratings in her department. She has been featured on the front page of the KU website, so she is representing ASE with pride (see http://www.oread.ku.edu/2010/january/19/stories/hiphop.shtm). She has one article coming out in this spring: “Sampling and Remixing Blackness: Suzan-Lori Parks’ History Plays and Hip-hop” in Philip Kolin, Ed. Suzan-Lori Parks: Essays on Myth, Race, and Gender (New York: Mc Farland Press, Spring 2010), and is also directing the university premier of the acclaimed play Sister Cities by Los Angeles playwright Colette Freedman this summer. The play will premier this July and will be produced as a film directed by Stockard Channing. Jennifer Lynn Stoever-Ackerman, Assistant Professor of English at State University of New York at Binghamton reports that she has an article coming out in the Spring 2010 issue of Social Text this March called "Splicing the Sonic Color-Line: Tony Schwartz Remixes Postwar Nueva York." She has also won a Dean's Research Fellowship at SUNY Binghamton for the Spring, allowing a semester of teaching release to work on her book manuscript, "The Sonic Color-line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening." ASE UNDERGRADUATE MAJORS/MINORS Gustavo Lopez, an undergraduate major in Chicano/Latino Studies and a McNair scholar, received a travel grant from the USC Ronald McNair Scholars Program and the USC Graduate School to present his senior thesis research at the National Conference for the National Association of Hispanic and Latino Studies in Baton Rouge, Louisiana in February.
December 2009The Council of Editors of Learned Journals has awarded the American Quarterly special issue "Nation and Migration" best special issue of the year. The guest editors are David Gutierrez and USC's own Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo.
ASE FACULTY Ariela J. Gross’ recent book, What Blood Won’t Tell: A History of Race on Trial in America won three awards this summer and fall. They are the American Political Science Association, Best Book on Race, Ethnicity & Politics, 2009; Lillian Smith Book Award (for best book about the people and problems of the U.S. South, especially the struggle for racial justice), Southern Regional Council & Univ. of Georgia, 2009; and the J. Willard Hurst Prize (for best book in socio-legal history), Law and Society Association, 2009. Robin D. G. Kelley has published Black, Brown, and Beige: Surrealist Writings from Africa and the Diaspora (University of Texas Press, 2009), co-edited with the late Franklin Rosemont; and "Historian in the World and Judicious Radical," Journal of African American History 94, no. 3 (2009), pp. 362-69. His biography, Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of An American Original (Free Press, 2009), was selected by the New York Times Book Review as one of its notable books of 2009. Thelonious Monk was also reviewed and featured in several publications, including New York Times – arts section; New York Times Book Review; Boston Globe; Christian Science Monitor; DownBeat; San Francisco Chronicle; JazzTimes; Time Out New York; with forthcoming reviews in the New Republic, Harper's, and the Nation. Kelley also appeared on the Tavis Smiley Show (TV and radio); NPR's "On Point," WNYC "Fishko files," among others, and recently taped an hour-long segment on Fresh Air with Terry Gross. In addition, he delivered the inaugural Harold Vyvyan Harmsworth Lecture at the University of Oxford on November 10, titled ' "He's got the whole world in his hands": US history and its discontents in the Obama era.' David Lloyd and Peter O'Neill are co-editors of The Black and Green Atlantic: Cross-Currents of the African and Irish Diasporas (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), which also includes an essay by USC Irvine fellow, Stacy Lettman. Shana Redmond was an invited speaker in October 2009 at Northwestern University's two day conference, "Lorraine Hansberry: A Raisin in the Sun and Beyond," where she spoke on Hansberry's relationship with Nina Simone. Other invited speakers included Harry Elam (Stanford) and Herman Beavers (UPenn). The conference was organized by Ivy Wilson of the English Department at Northwestern. John Carlos Rowe is bringing out two edited volumes, A Concise Companion to American Studies (Wiley-Blackwell's) in March 2010 and A Historical Guide to Henry James, coedited with Eric Haralson, which Oxford University Press will publish in the Fall. Rowe's new authored book, The Cultural Politics of the New American Studies, a sequel to The New American Studies, will appear in the Fall 2010 in an entirely digital and free format from Open Humanities Press, a new digital press committed to the rapid dissemination of new scholarship. Headed by one of the pioneers of digital publishing, Gary Hall (Digitize this Book! [University of Minnesota Press]), Open Humanities Press operates exactly like university presses by refereeing all manuscripts and distributing through the usual academic networks. It differs from them by paying authors no royalties and making all publications free to digital users. Libraries and others wishing printed "books" must pay a modest fee. Leland T. Saito has just published “From ‘Blighted’ to ‘Historic’: Race, Economic Development, and Historic Preservation in San Diego, California” in Urban Affairs Review 45:2 (2009): pp.166-187. George J. Sánchez has been selected as the outstanding Latino/a faculty in higher education research institutions by the American Association of Hispanics in Higher Education Inc. (AAHHE). The award recognizes an individual who has demonstrated excellence in both research and teaching and has provided significant contributions to his or her academic discipline. His former student Ana Rosas, a USC undergraduate and Ph.D., who now is an assistant professor of Chicano studies and history at the University of California, Irvine, nominated him for the award. He will be presented with the award next March in Costa Mesa at the annual AAHHE meeting. His current title has also been recently changed to Vice Dean for College Diversity. ASE Ph.D. STUDENTSMaytha Alhassen received a $750 Conference Attendance Award. Carolyn Dunn’s dissertation chapter on Arigon Starr entitled "Those Long, Lonely Nights at the Diner: Specificity of Place, Community and Home in Arigon Starr’s The Red Road" has been published in the peer reviewed anthology American Indian Performing Arts: Critical Directions, edited by Hanay Geiogamah and Jaye Darby, published by the American Indian Studies Center at UCLA (http://www.books.aisc.ucla.edu/toc/criticaldirections.html), available as of November 15th. She also gave that paper as part of my job talk at San Francisco State in April. Her play The Frybread Queen also had two staged readings this year, one at the La Jolla Playhouse and The Wells Fargo Theatre at the Autry National Center in June 2009. Kiana Green and Viet Le both received $500 Conference Attendance Awards. Christina Heatherton received a $1500 Graduate Professionalization Initiative Award for a symposium on the Mexican revolution. Viet Le is currently based in Cambodia for a year as a Center for Khmer Studies Senior Research Fellow. Le published a catalog essay entitled: ““Art, Dioxin and Development: Dinh Q. Lê’s Damaged Gene Revisited” for the artist’s exhibition in Germany. He presented his work at “Vietnam Update: Migration Nation 2009” conference at the Australian National University, Canberra and the Center for Khmer Studies, Phnom Penh. In summer 2009, he completed a new series of large scale drawings and paintings at the Civitelli Ranieri art residency in Umbertide, Italy. He is also a finalist for the Sovereign Foundation Asian Art Prize (Asia’s largest art prize); proceeds go to children’s education charities. You can vote for his work here: http://www.sovereignartfoundation.com/art-prizes/asia/gallery/?year=2009&page=1 Lata Murti has been awarded an Exemplary Diversity Scholar citation from the University of Michigan's National Center for Institutional Diversity (NCID) for her scholarship on issues of race and ethnicity. A copy of her research statement and curriculum vita are posted on the NCID website: http://www.ncid.umich.edu/fellows/exemplary0910.shtml. In more belated news, Lata attended the August 2009 annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, where she presented her dissertation research at a roundtable on racial and ethnic minorities; served as a discussant for a conference session on Gender and New Immigrant Communities; and completed an informal interview for a tenure-track assistant professorship in Sociology. Micaela Smith has been awarded an 18-month Mellon Doctoral Fellowship in the Faculty of Humanities at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, for the Mellon Sawyer Seminar Series on the theme ‘Property, Race and Poverty: Paradoxes of the Law and the Possibility of Justice in Contemporary South Africa’. She will take up her appointment starting March 1, 2010. Anthony Sparks is set to make his academic publishing debut with his article, "Minstrel Politics, or Obama Speaks Too Well: Rhetoric, Race, and Resistance in the 2008 Presidential Campaign." The article is scheduled for the winter issue of Argumentation and Advocacy, a peer-reviewed communications and forensics journal. Anthony was also recently the featured panelist at Disney/ABC network's Impact speaker series. And he also served as the dramaturge for the USC School of Theatre's production of "Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye."
October 2009
ASE STAFF
Kitty Lai will receive the Staff Recognition Award for the month of November 2009 for her outstanding work in support of the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity. She was nominated by Professors John Carlos Rowe, Janelle Wong, and Laura Pulido. She will receive a plaque for this honor in November, but be sure to congratulate her in person for this outstanding achievement!
ASE FACULTY Robin D.G. Kelley just published Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original (Free Press, 2009). He will be doing readings and signings in New York City, Washington D.C., Los Angeles and San Francisco. The New York Times is reviewing it on October 18th. Robin also has another book coming out in December: with Franklin Rosemont (eds.), Surrealism -- Black, Brown and Beige: Writings and Images from Africa and the African Diaspora (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009). He co-edited it, contributed several pieces and wrote the afterword. Robin also published an article in the upcoming Journal of African American History on John Hope Franklin, "The Historian in the World: A Remembrance," Journal of African American History 94, no. 3 (2009).
Dorinne Kondo had two students of hers defend their dissertations and go on to jobs/ post docs this year (see below). Her play, “Seamless,” will have a reading at the Lark Development Center in New York City in Spring 2010.
Peter Mancall (History and Anthropology; ASE affiliate faculty member) published Fatal Journey: The Final Expedition of Henry Hudson—A Tale of Mutiny and Murder in the Arctic (Basic Books) in June. He has done interviews about the book for 5 NPR regional affiliates (including New York City) and appeared on "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart" (on July 14). His writings about Hudson have appeared recently in the Chronicle of Higher Education, the History News Network, American Heritage, and Huntington Frontiers. Fatal Journey was briefly the number 1 selling book in history at Amazon Canada and has been on the bestseller list at the History Book Club since July.
Maria Elena Martinez’ book, Genealogical Fictions: Limpieza de Sangre, Religion, and Gender in Colonial Mexico (Stanford 2008), has received two book awards: One is the CLAH Mexican history prize (awarded to the best book in Mexican history by the American Historical Association's Conference on Latin American History). The other is the AHA Rawley prize for best book in Atlantic history, also awarded by the AHA. Both will be presented at the AHA Conference in San Diego this coming January. She was elected to the Board of Editors of the Journal of the History of Ideas, one of the premier journals of intellectual history in the United States. She was also one of the principal Research Consultants of a one-hour PBS Documentary entitled “In the Name of God and King,” on the early modern Spanish empire and the cultures of Spanish America, and was also interviewed in it. It will be aired in late 2009 or early 2010. Maria Elena co-directed the Tepoztlán Institute for the Transnational History of the Americas, which in July 2009 organized a major conference on “Revolution and Heterotopia” in Tepoztlán, Mexico. 70 scholars from Latin America, the United States and Europe participated. Her article, “The Language, Genealogy, and Classification of ‘Race’ in Colonial Mexico,” was recently published in Race and Classification: The Case of Mexican America, ed. Susan Deans-Smith and Ilona Katzew (Stanford University Press, 2009). She received a 2009-2010 Advancing Scholarship in the Humanities and Sciences Award. Finally, Carol Wise and Maria Elena received a College Commons award for 2009-2010 to organize events with Latin America and US/Borderlands themes. Viet Nguyen published“Remembering War, Dreaming Peace: On Cosmopolitanism, Compassion and Literature” in theJapanese Journal of American Studies (no. 20, 2009), also online athttp://wwwsoc.nii.ac.jp/jaas/periodicals/JJAS/. A chapter from his book Race and Resistance, "QueerBodies and Subaltern Spectators: Guerillatheatre, Hollywood Melodrama and the Filipino (American) Novel," was reprinted inAsian American Writers, ed. Harold Bloom. Along with Janet Hoskins of Anthropology, he received a $40,000James H. Zumberge Interdisciplinary Research Grant for the development of a Center for Transpacific Studies. He gave talks at Boston College, Harvard, and theUniversity of Hannover, Germany. The Harvard University Gazette profiled him in an article online at http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/HarvardGazette04.23.09.pdf. John Carlos Rowe has edited The Concise Companion to American Studies, which is now in production at Wiley-Blackwell's and should be available by the end of 2009. He has co-edited with Eric Haralson A Historical Guide to Henry James, which is being published by Oxford University Press in 2010. George J. Sánchez has recently published a new book, co-edited with Amy Koritz from Drew University. Civic Engagement in the Wake of Katrina (Univ. of Michigan Press, 2009) is the first book published in a new series on “The New Public Scholarship” that encourages alliances between scholars and communities by publishing writing that emerges from publicly engaged and intellectually consequential cultural work. The book, its editors, and its contributors were recently honored at the annual meeting of “Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life” held in New Orleans, Louisiana. He has also organized, along with Gary Gerstle (Vanderbilt), Mae Ngai (Columbia), and Sonya Michel (Woodrow Wilson Center), a conference “Fixing the Broken Immigration System: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Reform” to be held at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC on October 22-23, 2009. ASE Ph.D. STUDENTS Seven ASE Ph.D. Students were awarded an EDGE Travel Grant to attend the upcoming 2009 American Studies Association Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C. Noted in parenthesis is the faculty advisor that supported the student’s nomination via a letter of recommendation. The students are: Terrion Williamson (Professors Lanita Jacobs-Huey and Judith Jackson Fossett ); Jennifer DeClue (Professor Kara Keeling); Kiana Green (Professor Judith Halberstam); Celeste Menchaca (Professor George Sanchez); Margaret Salazar (Professor George Sanchez); Priscilla Leiva (Professor George Sanchez); and Gretel Vera-Rosas (Professor Macarena Gomez-Barris). May Alhassen performs in and helped organize a play titled “The Hijabi Monologues,” which is about the power of storytelling. It is about creating a space for American Muslim women to share their voices; a space to breathe as they are; a space that does not claim to tell every story and speak for every voice. The play has been written up positively by the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, and the Miami Herald after it performed in those cities. Jennifer DeClue has an article published in the most current GLQ: A journal of lesbian and gay studies (Volume 15 number 4) entitled "Queer Mother of Color". Kiana Green was selected as an awardee in the Ford Foundation Diversity Fellowship 2009 predoctoral competition. She was also selected to participate in the Wayne State University Department of Communication’s 2009 Summer Doctoral Seminar on Queer Media Culture, which was conducted by visiting scholar Amy Villarejo. Also, the ASA panel that she and Deborah Alkamano put together was accepted (Jennifer DeClue, a first year ASE student is also on the panel).
ASE DOCTORAL GRADUATES Laura Barraclough has signed a contract for her book, "Rural Urbanism: Geographies of Whiteness in the American West" with the University of Georgia Press, and it is due out fall 2010 as part of the new Geographies of Justice and Social Transformation series. She published an article entitled "South Central Farmers and Shadow Hills Homeowners: Land Use Policy and Relational Racialization in Los Angeles" in the May 2009 issue of the Professional Geographer. Laura also won the LaPlante Foundation Grant from Kalamazoo College to support a service-learning project she put together involving students in a campaign for felony expungement and to decrease policy barriers to employment for people with a criminal record.
Emily Hobson defended, graduated, and filed her dissertation and was hired as Lecturer in the Department of Feminist Studies at UC Santa Barbara.
Nicole Hodges-Persley has accepted a tenure-track job as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Theatre at the University of Kansas.
Hillary Jenks received the W. Turrentine Jackson Dissertation Award from Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association for her 2008 ASE dissertation, “’Home is Little Tokyo’: Race, Community, and Memory in Twentieth-Century Los Angeles.” She is currently an Assistant Professor at Portland State University in their Honors Program. Imani Johnson has accepted a postdoctoral fellowship position in the New York University Post-Doctoral and Transition Program for Academic Diversity. This is a 2 year, and possibly 3 year, postdoctoral fellowship. Ana Elizabeth Rosas is an assistant professor in the Departments of Chicana/o-Latina/o Studies and History at the University of California, Irvine. Her research on the coming of age experiences of Mexican young women will be featured in a forthcoming special issue on Transnational Gender History of the Gender and History journal. Her mentorship was honored by her undergraduate students' invitation to deliver the keynote address at this year's University of California, Irvine Raza Graduation Ceremony. Her latest research on the burdens of expectation of Mexican children across the Mexican countryside and rural towns throughout the United States was part of the California State University, Channel Islands' Chicana/o Speaker Series, and will be published on a forthcoming edited volume on the Bracero Program. Most recently, she was awarded a Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship to advance her commitment to diversity through her completion of a book manuscript on the mid-twentieth century Mexican immigrant experience under the mentorship of Dr. George Lipsitz of the Department of Black Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Ulli K. Ryder was just hired by the Center for the Study of Race & Ethnicity in America at Brown University as an Instructor and Advisor. She will be teaching and advising students in the Honors Thesis program and working on other projects housed at the CSREA. The first is a project documenting the history of the Cape Verdean community in Providence, led by Claire Andrade-Watkins and Evelyn Hu-DeHart. Ulli is also still involved as a member of the Board of Advisors for College Unbound -- helping them integrate their students into Providence and build relationships between College Unbound and other schools in the area such as Brown, RISD, etc. Karen Yonemoto has joined the Religious Studies department at Claremont McKenna College as Visiting Assistant Professor where she is teaching the courses "Asian American Religion," "History of World Christianity" and "Introduction to Western Religious Tradition." ASE UNDERGRADUATE MAJORS/MINORS Gustavo Lopez, senior in Chicano/Latino Studies, has been chosen to attend the University of Michigan’s Silver Anniversary Celebration of Latino Studies on the campus from October 29-31, 2009. ASE GRADUATES Denise Chang holds a BA in American Studies from USC. She has joined the Navy and will be working as a Mass Communication Specialist that performs tasks like photojournalism and reporting. The contract runs from next July 2010-2015. Eduardo Coronel is currently enrolled in the Educational Policy Studies Ph.D. program at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He is also working as a Graduate Counselor for the Access & Achievement Program (AAP) and the Transition Program. If anyone at USC (American Studies & Ethnicity) ever needs any help, please contact him. He would love to help in the advancement of the ASE!!
April 2009
We all join to celebrate the election of Ruth Wilson Gilmore as the next President of the American Studies Association. This brings to four faculty members from USC who have been elected to this significant post. Ruthie will serve as President-elect at the 2009 meeting in Washington, D.C., then her presidential conference will be in Fall 2010 in San Antonio, Texas. Let’s all plan to attend and celebrate her great achievement!
The total number of Ford Foundation Diversity Fellows now in the American Studies & Ethnicity Ph.D. program is up to ten students, a record number for any Ph.D. program in any field in the nation. Terrion Williamson has just been awarded a Ford Foundation Diversity Dissertation Fellowship for 2009-10. Kiana Green and incoming student Analena Hassberg have just been awarded a Ford Foundation Diversity Predoctoral Fellowship (three years of fellowship funding). The Ford Foundation Diversity Fellowships are awarded across all academic disciplines, and are the nation’s most prestigious and competitive fellowships intended to promote diversity in the academic profession. The other Ford Fellows in the ASE program are Genevieve Carpio, Michelle Commander, Chrisshonna Grant Nieva, Imani K. Johnson, Anthony Rodriguez, Abigail Rosas and Orlando Serrano.
ASE FACULTY Sarah Gualtieri has published Between Arab and White: Race and Ethnicity in the Early Syrian American Diaspora (University of California Press, 2009). In addition, she has been promoted to Associate Professor with tenure. Congratulations Sarah! Sociology Ph.D student Hernan Ramirez and Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo have published an article together this year, “Mexican Immigrant Gardeners in Los Angeles: Entrepreneurs or Exploited Workers?” Social Problems 56(1):70-88. Robin D.G. Kelley has been appointed as the Harold Vyvyan Harmsworth Professor of American history, at Oxford University in the United Kingdom, for the 2009-2010 academic year. This is the most distinguished honor by the United Kingdom bestowed on any U.S. historian, and we congratulate Robin for achieving this great honor! Josh Kun published an essay, "The Sound of the Desert Sublime" in the Winter issue of Convergence, the magazine of the Autry National Center. The issue is a special issue dedicated to exploring "The Sonic West." Kun's essay is an excerpt from a longer work which he originally delivered to the Western History Workshop at the Autry National Center's Institute for the Study of the American West. Viet Nguyen published“Multimedia as Composition: Research, Writing, and Creativity” inAcademic Commons(http://www.academiccommons.org/) and four entries inThe Encyclopedia of Asian American Literature(Greenwood Press),for which he also serves on the advisory board. He gave invited talks at Brandeis, Berkeley and Harvard, and read from his fiction at St. Stephen's Church in Hollywood. He also receiveda JamesIrvine Foundation Honorary Fellowship from the Djerassi Resident Artists Program andan Arts Writers Grant from theCreative Capital | Warhol Foundation that will fund his research for an article on contemporary art and the Vietnam War. Manuel Pastor has published, along with Chris Benner and Martha Matsuoka, the book This Could Be the Start of Something Big: How Social Movements for Regional Equity are Reshaping Metropolitan America (Cornell Univ. Press, 2009). Leland Saito has published, The Politics of Exclusion: The Failure of Race Neutral -Policies in Urban America (Stanford University Press 2009). George Sanchez delivered the 2009 W.P. Whitsett Lecture at CSU Northridge in California and Western history on April 2, 2009. The lecture was entitled “Edward R. Roybal and the Politics of Multiracialism,” and was delivered to a standing room only audience, including several members of the Roybal extended family. Karen Tongson's essay "Tickle Me Emo: Lesbian Balladeering, Straight-Boy Emo and the Politics of Affect," which was originally anthologized in Queering the Popular Pitch (Routledge), is being translated into German for the Cultural Studies journal Testcard. In December, she delivered a talk at the MLA Convention in San Francisco, titled "Thriller in Cebu." This spring, Tongson has been invited to give lectures at Bryn Mawr College, The University of Washington, The Claremont Graduate School and Ewha University in Seoul, Korea. In May she will participate in a special event for CLAGS (the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies in New York), titled "Let it Rock: Contemporary Voices in Queer Music" with JD Samson (Le Tigre), Nomi (Hercules and Love Affair), Tavia Nyong'o (NYU) and Larry Tee (NY Nightclub Legend). Earlier in the spring, Tongson was invited to participate in Tropical Renditions: Musics of Filipino America at UC Riverside, where her mom, Pinay jazz singer, Maria Katindig-Dykes, also performed. Tongson co-produced her mom's album, No More Blues, which was released in October 2008 by Skipper Productions. In addition to working on her book during her leave this semester, Tongson wrote a short piece for In Media Res, called "Miss Independent: Between Women, Reconsidered," and an essay called "Empires of My Familiar" for a forthcoming anthology on popular music. In April, she and Josh Kun will be presenting on a panel together, called "Take Back the Nightclub" at the EMP Pop Music conference in Seattle.
ASE Ph.D. STUDENTSWendy Cheng has accepted a position at New York University as an Assistant Professor/ Faculty Fellow in Asian/Pacific/American Studies in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis. Nicole Hodges Persley has accepted a tenure track job as an Assistant Professor in Theatre and Film at The University of Kansas. Phuong Nguyen recently accepted a 2-year Mellon postdoctoral fellowship in Asian American Studies from Northwestern University. He is nearing completion of his social and cultural history of Vietnamese Americans entitled “The People of the Fall: Refugee Nationalism in Little Saigon, 1975-2005,” under the direction of Prof's. Lon Kurashige, George Sanchez, Viet Nguyen, Ruthie Gilmore, and William Deverell.
Thang Dao won a USC Wallis Annenberg Fellowship (full funding for one academic year).
Perla Guererro won a USC Oakley Fellowship (full funding for one academic year).
Jesus Hernandez won a USC Feuchtwanger Fellowship (full funding for one academic year).
Emily Hobson won a USC Final Summer Fellowship.
Alvaro Marquez won a Del Amo Foundation Summer Fellowship.
Mark Padoongpatt won a USC Conference Travel Award.
Abigail Rosas is the recipient of a 2009 Haynes Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Award (full funding for one academic year).
Anton Smith won a USC Wallis Annenberg Fellowship (full funding for one academic year).
Laura Fujikawa, Jeffrey Govan, Chrisshonna Grant, Lata Murti, and Margaret Salazar won USC Diversity Enhancement Placement Awards. ASE UNDERGRADUATE STUDENTFor the second year in a row, one of our undergraduate majors has won the prestigious Fulbright Student Grant for one year of study, research or teaching abroad. This year, the winner is Vanessa Hongsathavj, 2009 Bachelor of Arts in American Studies and Ethnicity, East Asian Area Studies, Political Science, with a minor in Southeast Asia and Its People. A recipient of the Fulbright grant to Laos, Vanessa will study how the organization the International Union for Conservation of Nature addresses the interests of three ethnic groups – the Lao, Yoane, and Brao. Vanessa is specifically interested in how the organization incorporates the three ethnic groups into its development plan as part of the Biodiversity Conservation Corridors Initiative.
December 2008
ASE FACULTY Sarah Banet-Weiser received a Provost's grant from the Advancing Scholarship in the Social Sciences and Humanities this year, along with a slew of other ASE folks, including Karen Tongson, Kara Keeling, Macarena Gomez-Barris, Viet Nguyen, and Laura Pulido. . . so a really good representation from ASE! Sarah has also written the preface for a book being co-edited by Macarena Gomez-Barris and Herman Gray, tentatively titled Social Traces in Culture, coming out with University of Minnesota Press. Sarah has also co-authored and essay with Herman Gray called "Our Media Studies" which is coming out in a special edition of Television and New Media this winter.
Bill Deverell is pleased to announce the publication of The Blackwell Companion to California History, co-edited with Professor David Igler of UC Irvine. Macarena Gomez-Barris was awarded the 2008 Raubenheimer Junior Faculty Award for Research, Teaching, and Service. She recently published Where Memory Dwells: Culture and State Violence in Chile (University of California Press, 2009). Macarena moderated the Gender, Race, and Violence workshop held at USC last month, and was accepted to give a paper at the Latin American Studies Association in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil during June 2009. She is a finalist for the Fulbright lecture/research competition in Peru. If awarded the Fulbright, she will continue doing field and site research on questions regarding indigeneity, tourism, and cultural memory during Fall 2009. Jack Halberstam received a GE teaching award and Female Masculinity, Jack's second book, was translated into Spanish and published in Spain by Egales Press. This semester, Jack gave talks in Australia, Edinburgh, Bogota and Medellin and at Columbia University and SUNY Buffalo. Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo has published God's Heart Has No Borders: How Religious Activists are Working for Immigrant Rights (University of California Press, 2008); and with Hernan Ramirez, "Mexican Immigrant Gardeners in Los Angeles: Entrepreneurs or Exploited Workers?" Social Problems (February 2009). Robin D.G. Kelley has published “Burning Symbols: The Work of Art in the Age of Tyrannical (Re)Production,” in Hank Willis Thomas, Pitch Blackness (New York: Aperture, 2008); “Will Obama Be the First ‘Freedom’ Democrat?” Counterpunch (November 19, 2008); “President-Elect Barack Obama: A Postracial President Who Should Focus the Country on Race,” U. S. News and World Report (November 5, 2008), http://www.usnews.com/articles/opinion/2008/11/05/ ; “An Interview with Robin D. G. Kelley by Benjamin Holtzman,” In the Middle of a Whirlwind (Fall 2008), http://inthemiddleofthewhirlwind.wordpress.com/an-interview-with-robin-dg-kelley/ , which was reprinted in The Journal of Aesthetics and Protest. He also delivered lectures at Hampshire College, Case Western Reserve, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and Oberlin College in October and November 2008. Dorinne Kondo completed a revision of her play "SEAMLESS" that received a reading at Moving Arts Theatre in November. Roberto Lint Sagarena and Jane Iwamura both have chapters in the newly published, Immigration and Religion in America: Comparative and Historical Perspectives (ed. Richard Alba, Albert J. Raboteau, and Josh DeWind, NYU Press). Peter Mancall has been elected to membership in the American Antiquarian Society and received a senior Raubenheimer Award. George Sanchez recently celebrated the publication of the 25th book in the book series he co-edits with University of California Press, the “American Crossroads” series. His other co-editors for this award-winning series, now in its second decade, are George Lipsitz (UC Santa Barbara), Earl Lewis (Emory), Peggy Pascoe (Univ. of Oregon), and Dana Takagi (UC Santa Cruz). The 25th book in the series is Jana K. Lipman’s Guantanamo: A Working-Class History Between Empire and Revolution (2008). Upcoming in the series in 2009 are books by Andrew Diamond on multiracial youth culture in Chicago and by our own Sarah Gualtieri on race, whiteness and Arab American identity in Syrian diasporic migration. Sanchez has also been asked to present the 2009 W.P. Whitsett Lecture at CSU Northridge in California and Western history this coming spring. He is also currently serving on the search committee to select a new Executive Director for the Organization of American Historians. Francille Wilson has published a new article, “Becoming ‘Woman of the Year’: Sadie Alexander’s Construction of a Public Persona as a Black Professional Women, 1920-1950,” Black Women, Gender, & Families 2:2 (Fall 2008), pp. 1-30. She was also reappointed by Mayor Villaraigosa and the Los Angeles City Council for a full 5 year term as Commissioner, Los Angeles City Commission on the Status of Women. She also serves on the nominating committee of Labor and Working Class History Association. ASE Ph.D. STUDENTSLata Murti has had a paper accepted for presentation at the annual Pacific Sociological Association meeting (April 2009, San Diego) for the second year in a row. But she considers her greatest achievement of the semester to be completing six academic job/post-doc applications, while making progress on her dissertation, grading for an undergraduate Sociology course, and caring for her newborn baby (with help, of course!).
Anthony Sparks was recently interviewed by National Public Radio regarding his reaction to Barack Obama's election to the U.S. Presidency. The segment aired on NPR's "Day by Day" program. He was also a recent panelist at a presentation/talk hosted by USC Annenberg & Hollywood, Health and Society.
ASE Ph.D. ALUMNI Dan HoSang is his second year as an Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies and Political Science at the University of Oregon. Over the summer, his dissertation received two additional prizes--the 2008 W. Turrentine Jackson Prize for Best Dissertation on the 20th Century U.S. West by the Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association and the 2008 Best Dissertation Prize of the Race, Ethnicity, and Politics Section of the American Political Science Association. He was designated the 2008-09 Resident Scholar at the University of Oregon's Wayne Morse Center for Law and Politics, and is using the fellowship to finish his book manuscript for UC Press. A revised chapter from the manuscript was recently published as "The Rise of Racial Liberalism, the Decline of Racial Justice" in Joe Lowndes, Julie Novkov, and Dorian Warren edited Race and American Political Development (Routledge). Dan is also co-organizing a public symposium (with ASE faculty Laura Pulido) titled "Racial Formation in the 21st Century" featuring Michael Omi, Howard Winant, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Laura Gomez, Devon Carbado, Andrea Smith, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Nikhil Singh and others. The symposium will be in Eugene, Oregon on April 17 and 18, 2009.
November 2008
ASE FACULTY Ruthie Gilmore won the Lora Romero Best First Book Award from the American Studies Association for Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (University of California Press, 2007). She's also published two new articles in the past several months -- "Race, Prisons, and War: Scenes from the History of US Violence" in Socialist Register 2009: Violence Today: Actually Existing Barbarism, ed. Leo Panitch and Colin Leys (London: The Merlin Press, 2008), 73-87; and "Forgotten Places and the Seeds of Grassroots Planning" in Engaging Contradictions ed. Charles R. Hale (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 31-61.
Macarena Gomez-Barris has published her first book, Where Memory Dwells: Culture and State Violence in Chile (University of California Press, 2008).
Kara Keeling signed an advance contract with New York University Press for her second single-authored book, tentatively entitled Queer Times, Black Futures. She received an Advancing Scholarship in the Humanities and Social Sciences grant from USC to support her research on African Cinema and Digital Technologies. Keeling’s essay, “Passing for Human: Bamboozled and Digital Humanism” has been reprinted in Fight the Power: The Spike Lee Reader, edited by Janice D. Hamlet and Robin Means Coleman (Peter Lang Publishing, 2009). In June, Keeling presented material from her book The Witch’s Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense (Duke University Press, 2007) to members of the non-profit organization Southerners On New Ground in Durham, NC. Josh Kun has co-authored a book, And You Shall Know Us By The Trail Of Our Vinyl: The Jewish Past As Told By The Records We've Loved and Lost (Crown), which will be out November 18th. See www.trailofourvinyl.com for more information. Kun was also the recipient of a $10,000 Casden Institute Faculty Research Grant for his proposal to document African American and Jewish relations in 20th century American life. The project will take the form of a musical anthology, tentatively titled “Go Down Moses: The Secret Musical History of Black-Jewish Relations,” and Kun will produce the study. The CD itself will be released by Reboot Stereophonic, a nationally acclaimed non-profit record label Kun co-founded in 2004 that is dedicated to excavating lost treasures of Jewish-American musical history and re-examining dominant narratives of Jewish-American identity. The label's motto, "History sounds different if you know where to start listening," relates to its mandate of creating musical conversations "otherwise impossible in daily life," according to the label's website. David Lloyd just published--and launched in Dublin--a new collection of essays, Irish Times: Temporalities of Modernity (Field Day/ Notre Dame, 2008). Maria Elena Martinez has published her first book, Genealogical Fictions: Limpieza de Sangre, Religion, and Gender in Colonial Mexico (Stanford University Press, 2008). Viet Nguyen published “At Home With Race” in PMLA (October 2008: 1557-1565) and “The Authenticity of the Anonymous: Popular Culture and the Art of War,” in transPOP: Korea Vietnam Remix (Seoul: Arko Arts Center, Arts Council Korea, 2008: 58-67). He was the Alan Collins Scholar at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference in Vermont in August, where he also gave a reading from his fiction. Karen Tongson received an Advancing the Humanities and Social Sciences Grant for 2008-2009, to work on her book, RELOCATIONS: Queer of Color Suburban Imaginaries (contracted to the NYU Press Sexual Cultures series edited by Jose Esteban Munoz and Ann Pellegrini). She recently delivered a paper at the ASA Annual Convention in Albuquerque on "The Softer Side of Long Beach" (for a panel organized by ASE Ph.D. candidate, Wendy Cheng, on "Alternative Suburban Geographies"), and published a review essay on Jasbir Puar's TERRORIST ASSEMBLAGES in "Women in Performance." In the months leading up to the national election, Tongson also offered commentary on gender, popular culture and the presidential race for local television (KCBS, Fox 11 News, KTLA) and the international print media (The Chicago Tribune, Les Inrockuptibles, La Opinion, The Philadelphia Enquirer). Oh! Industry, the blog she co-produces with Alexandra Vazquez (Princeton) and Christine Balance (UCI), has just celebrated its one year anniversary, and recently featured a guest post by her new ASE colleague, Shana Redmond.
ASE Ph.D. STUDENTSAdam Bush was appointed to the Executive Board of the Studio for Southern California History, to the K-16 Collaboration Committee of the ASA, and as the Assistant Director of the PAGE (Publicly Active Graduate Education) Program for Imagining America; a national consortium of colleges and universities committed to civic engagement. He worked with George Sanchez to host the 2008 Imagining America conference at USC, which brought scholars, artists, musicians, and activists into conversation of engaging diversity and social change through public humanities. Genevieve Carpio presented her first paper at the 2008 American Studies Association national conference in Albuquerque, received a Graduate Professionalism Grant to work with the Southern California Library, a Diversity Placement Award, the EDGE Summer Scholarship, and was recognized as a PAGE Fellow with Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life. It's been a great few months for her!
Jih-Fei Cheng presented his paper "Sex, Crimes & Punishment: A Tour of Duty" at the Queer Studies Los Angeles Conference at UCLA this past October 2008.
Carolyn Dunn published a children's book Coyote Speaks in August 2008. Dunn also published some poetry in the last year in the Endicott Journal of Mythic Arts and in the newly published book Birthed from Scorched Hearts: Women and War. She also published a piece in the special Hurricane Katrina issue of American Indian Quarterly (Fall 2008), and organized a staged reading of her play “The Frybread Queen” at the Autry National Center on November 5th.
Emily Hobson published a brief article on Nicaraguan feminism in the September issue of the magazine make/shift. She also got married to her partner, Felicia Perez.
Viet Le is happy to be back in the States after a year of “research” in Viet Nam. He has forthcoming chapters in Modern and Contemporary Southeast Asian Art: A Critical Anthology (Cornell University Press, 2009); Vietnamese Contemporary Art after Doi Moi (Singapore Art Museum Press, 2008). His November 2008 Perspectives column entitled “Home, Again: Vietnamese Contemporary Art” is online at Asian Art Archive (http://www.aaa.org.hk/newsletter_detail.aspx?newsletter_id=574.) His recent catalogue essays on artists Sandrine Llouquet and Tiffany Chung have been published by Galerie Quynh, Sài Gòn and Tyler Rollins Fine Art, New York, respectively. Le has co-edited the BOL Journal special issue entitled Viet Nam and Us (Seoul: BOL, fall 2008), and Reflections: A Journal of Writing, Service Learning, and Community Literacy special volume Academia and Activism (Syracuse University Press, fall 2007): (http://reflections.syr.edu). He recently had his creative work featured at doebaebacsa Gallery, Seoul, Korea; Sàn Art Independent Art Space; Sài Gòn, Viet Nam; and his poetry translated into Vietnamese in the November issue of damau.org. In November he was invited to conduct a poetry workshop and reading at Macaulay Honors College (CUNY, NY). For the past three years, Le has been co-organizing with Yong Soon Min the internationally traveling exhibit transPOP: Korea Viet Nam Remix (ARKO Art Center, Seoul; Galerie Quynh and Sàn Art, Sài Gòn; University Art Gallery, Irvine (www.ucigallery.com); each site has related symposiums, residencies, screenings, and art talks). transPOP will be at its final stop at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, December 5, 2008- March 18, 2009: www.ybca.org.
Anjali Nath received a Diversity Placement Award for Summer 2008.
Tanachai Mark Padoongpatt was just recently nominated for a Center for Excellence in Teaching Award (CET).
Anthony Sparks, previously a finalist, has received a 2008 Sentinel Award. The Sentinel for Health Award is given as a joint project by the Norman Lear Center at USC Annenberg, The Centers for Disease Control, and Hollywood, Health, and Society. The entertainment industry/academic award acknowledged and rewarded his work as a writer-producer on the television series "Lincoln Heights", specifically for a script that dealt effectively with gang violence, and the role of art and artists in notions of community health. Sentinel Award Judge's comments were printed and distributed at the awards ceremony. Comments for Anthony and his work included the following: "...This is groundbreaking [television]..." and is "...beautifully written and filled with hope..." Earlier this year Anthony was nominated for a 2008 NAACP Image Award.
Terrion Williamson organized the USC Joint Faculty/Graduate Seminar on Violence, Race and Gender this fall after receiving a grant through the Graduate Professionalism Initiative. The day-long event brought together a contingent of scholars from various institutions invested in working at the intersection of violence, race and gender, including Joy James, Professor of Humanities and Political Science at Williams College, and Andrea Smith, Assistant Professor of American Culture and Women's Studies at the University of Michigan.
Karen Yonemoto has received a Pond Dissertation Fellowship to support the completion of her dissertation addressing the civic engagement of multiracial congregations in the United States.
ASE Ph.D. ALUMNI Laura Barraclough (Ph.D. 2006) has moved to Kalamazoo, Michigan where she is a Professor of Anthropology and Sociology at Kalamazoo College. She has published three articles this year (her first three!), including "Rural Urbanism: Producing Western Heritage and the Racial Geography of Postwar Los Angeles," Western Historical Quarterly (2008), 39(2): 177-202, which has been nominated for the Alice Hamilton Prize awarded by the American Society in Environmental History. The other two articles are essays co-authored with other ASE folks: Laura Pulido and Laura Barraclough (2008) "A People's Guide to Los Angeles: An Experiment in Popular Geography," Progress in Human Geography 32(5): 680-718; and Barraclough, Laura R. and Wendy Cheng (2008) "Democratizing Tourism, Illuminating Power: A People's Guide to Los Angeles," Progressive Planning 176: 4-6. In addition, she has been invited to present her work on environmental justice in Chatsworth at the Autry's Western History Workshop in March 2009. Hillary Jenks (Ph.D. 2008) has moved to Portland, Oregon and begun her assistant professor job in the Honors Program at Portland State University. She has also published her article "Urban Space, Ethnic Community, and National Belonging: The Political Landscape of Memory in Little Tokyo" in the November issue (73.3) of GeoJournal: An International Journal on Geography. This summer, Ulli K. Ryder (Ph.D. 2008) completed her dissertation and was awarded her PhD. In June she was awarded a Teaching Fellowship in American Cultures at Loyola Marymount University where she is teaching courses in American Cultures and African American Studies.
April/May 2008
ASE FACULTY John Carlos Rowe has been appointed the next chair of the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity. Janelle Wong has agreed to serve as Director of Graduate Studies and Laura Pulido has agreed to serve as Director of Undergraduate Studies in this new administration of the department. Congratulations and best wishes to our new leadership!
Sarah Banet-Weiser received a 2008 Mellon Mentoring Award for “Faculty to Graduate Mentoring.”
Lanita Jacobs-Huey received a 2008 Mellon Mentoring Award for “Faculty to Undergraduate Mentoring.”
Josh Kun has published "The Ballad of Speedy Gonzalez"-- an essay for a special issue on Music History, for Slate.com; and "A Space For The Possible"-- an essay on the spatial politics of the 1980s East Los Angeles punk club The Vex-- appearing in the Claremont Museum of Art exhibition catalog, Vexing: Female Voices in East L.A. Punk. http://www.claremontmuseum.org/future.html In April, he delivered a Keynote Lecture in American Studies, "Border Sound Files: Music, Globalization, and the US-Mexico Border," at Dickinson College in Carlisle, PA, after his book Audiotopia: Music, Race, and America was chosen as a featured book for the college's Senior Seminars in American Studies; and delivered a paper, "The Music of Migrancy" at the 2008 Pop Conference at the Experience Music Project Museum in Seattle, WA, and participated in the conference's Keynote Panel, "Ritmo and Blues: Hidden Histories Shaking Up "American" Pop" which featured musicians Louie Perez (Los Lobos), Raul Pacheco (Ozomatli), panel co-organizer Martha Gonzalez (Quetzal), and El Vez. http://www.empsfm.org/education/index.asp?categoryID=26
Maria Elena Martinez, one of our active ASE affiliate faculty members from History, has been promoted to Associate Professor with tenure. Congratulations, Maria Elena!
Viet Nguyen has received an Advancing Scholarship in the Humanities and Social Sciences Grant from USC for 2008-2009. He gave a keynote speech at the Comparative Literature Symposium on War, Empire, and Culture at Texas Tech University, and also gave comments and a talk at the Southeast Asians in the Diaspora Conference at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and the Association for Asian American Studies Conference in Chicago, all in April. In May, he gave a reading of his fiction at the Palo Alto Art Center. His short story, “The Other Woman,” was reprinted in A Stranger Among Us: Stories of Cross-Cultural Collision and Connection, published by OV Books. His article “Race and Resistance: On Asian American Cultural Politics” was translated and published in Japanese in The Bulletin of the Law Society of Kansai University, number 58 (March 2008). Manuel Pastor, along with affiliate member Dowell Myers, have been appointed as co-directors of a new USC Center for Immigrant Integration. The new center has been created by the USC College and the USC School of Policy, Planning, and Development (SPPD) to address the urgent need for knowledge about the successful integration of immigrants. The center aims to facilitate civic dialogue about the intersecting issues of immigrant settlement, economic mobility, social cohesion and social equity. Rather than focusing only on new arrivals, the center will promote research and dialogue concerning long-term issues of immigrant settlement, generational succession, incorporation and integration. The new center was announced at a very successful conference by the ongoing USC Provost Initiative on Immigration and Integration on April 22 which drew about 350 academics, policymakers and community leaders. Leland Saito has published "African Americans and Historic Preservation in San Diego: The Douglas and Clermont/Coast Hotels,” in the Journal of San Diego History 54 (2008), pp. 1-15. George Sanchez has been appointed Director of College Diversity. The newly created position is designed to coordinate the College’s efforts to increase diversity among faculty and students, by working with academic departments to ensure that recruitment is guided by emerging best practices. Sanchez will also work with national organizations and foundations to develop special programs for diversity. He will also continue to serve as Director of the USC Center for Diversity and Democracy. Karen Tongson produced a series of successful, sold out events for Visions and Voices. Collectively billed “Records y Recuerdos: Music and Memory in East L.A.,” the series included the workshop production of The Butchlalis de Panochtitlan’s first full-length play, “THE BARBER OF EAST L.A” (directed by Luis Alfaro), and a retrospective of the artist, Hector Silva’s work at the ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archive. She also signed a book contract with the NYU Press Sexual Cultures Series (edited by Jose Esteban Munoz and Ann Pellegrini) for her first monograph, RELOCATIONS: Queer of Color Suburban Imaginaries. This spring Karen hosted an evening of “suburban music” at LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions), to kick off a series of listening parties curated by Josh Kun. She also delivered a talk at ACLA (The American Comparative Literature Association Annual Conference) about The Carpenters and their musical origins in Long Beach, CA. In May, Karen has been invited to give a talk at UC Riverside on “Immigrant Soundscapes from Manila to Riverside” as part of the “New Perspectives in Ethnic Studies” series. She will be on leave in 2008-2009 after receiving an Achievement in the Humanities and Social Sciences grant, and an honorable mention for the Woodrow Wilson Junior Faculty fellowship.
ASE Ph.D. STUDENTSHillary Jenks has accepted an offer from Portland State University to be a tenure-track assistant professor in its University Honors Program. Hillary is currently completing her dissertation, "Home Is Little Tokyo": Race, Community, and Memory in Twentieth-Century Los Angeles, under the direction of George Sanchez. Her research and teaching interests include American urban and western history, architectural history, comparative ethnic studies, public history, and historic preservation. Congratulations and best wishes to Hillary! Nicole Hodges-Persley received a 2008 Mellon Mentoring Award for “Faculty to Undergraduate Mentoring” for her work as an Adjunct Faculty in the USC School of Theatre. In addition, she won a 2008 Final Summer Dissertation Award to complete her Ph.D. Nicole has also accepted an appointment as a Visiting Professor under a Teaching Fellowship in American Cultures at Loyola Marymount University. She will graduate this year and join LMU in the fall. Congratulations Nicole! Terrion Williamson is the inaugural winner of the 2008 Ninfa Sanchez Memorial Graduate Prize for her paper, “Blackness, Death and the Pleasure Principle: Of “Nappy-Headed Hos” and the Serial Murder of African American Women.” This paper was nominated for the award by Professor Dorinne Kondo, and was produced in American Studies 680: Interdisciplinary Research Seminar in Cultural Studies in Spring semester 2007. The total number of Ford Fellows now in our Ph.D. program is up to seven students, a record number for any Ph.D. program in any field in the nation. Imani K. Johnson has just been awarded a Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellowship for 2008-09. Orlando Serrano has just been awarded a Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship (three years of funding). Congratulations to each of them! The other Ford Fellows in the program are Genevieve Carpio, Michelle Commander, Chrisshonna Grant, Anthony Rodriguez, and Abigail Rosas. A total of seventeen of our Ph.D. students received 2008 Diversity Placement Assistant Awards: Jungmiwha Bullock, Genevieve Carpio, Wendy Cheng, Michelle Commander, Laura Fujikawa, Chrisshonna Grant, Perla Guerrero, Jesus Hernandez, Todd Honma, Anjali Nath, Sionne Neely, Anthony Rodriguez, Abigail Rosas, Anton Smith, Micaela Smith, Tasneem Siddiqui, and Cam Vu. These grants are, in the College's words, "designed to help our continuing doctoral students from underrepresented groups land top caliber placements. These funds are available to support activities such as, but not limited to, the following: Sending a student to a prestigious summer institute; Sending a student to work for a summer or semester with a revered colleague at another institution; Providing summer support for research with a faculty mentor which results in a publication; Small interdisciplinary dissertation writing or publications workgroups." Congratulations to each winner! Wendy Cheng has received the Oakley Fellowship, a USC Graduate School Endowed Fellowship for 2008-09. Thang Dao and Mark Padoongpatt both gave excellent papers at the Southeast Asians in the Diaspora Conference at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Robert Eap has received a Foreign Languages and Area Studies Scholarship to attend the Southeast Asian Summer Studies Institute in Madison, Wisconsin. Emily Hobson has received an Outstanding Achievement Scholarship of $5,000 from the USC Lamba Alumni Association. It's been a great year for Emily, who also has been appointed as a Dissertation Scholar at UC Santa Barbara's Women's Studies Program for 2008-2009. Phuong Nguyen has been awarded a Final Year Dissertation Fellowship from the USC Graduate School. Mark Padoongpatt has received the Beaumont Fellowship, a USC Graduate School Endowed Fellowship for 2008-09. Anthony Rodriguez, along with his DPS award, has received the Visual Studies (VSGC) Summer Research Award. Margaret Salazar and Glenda Flores (Soc) recently sponsored the well attended graduate students of color graduate outreach conference at Cal State Northridge. They also received an outstanding committee chair trophy from the Graduate and Professional Students Senate. ASE UNDERGRADUATE STUDENTS
Divinity Barkley, graduating senior in African American Studies and Political Science, took top honors in the humanities category at the 10th annual Undergraduate Symposium for Scholarly and Creative Work for her project, “Kaya Hip-Hop in Coastal Kenya: The Urban Poetry of Ukoo Flani.” That paper was also selected as one of two inaugural winners of the 2008 Ninfa Sanchez Memorial Undergraduate Awards in American Studies and Ethnicity by the ASE Undergraduate Studies Committee. The paper was nominated for the award by Professor Francille Wilson and was produced in her class, American Studies 499: Special Topics: The African Diaspora, in Spring semester 2008. This fall she plans to return to Africa to start a program benefiting teenage girls in Kampala, Uganda. Adriana Resendez, graduating senior in American Studies and Ethnicity, has been awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to study issues of gender and race in Guatemala next year. Her senior thesis, “’Here we are all the same?’: Pre and Post-migration Intra-Ethnic Relations Among Guatemalan Women,” was selected as one of two inaugural winners of the 2008 Ninfa Sanchez Memorial Undergraduate Awards in American Studies and Ethnicity by the ASE Undergraduate Studies Committee. The paper was nominated for the award by Professors Macarena Gomez-Barris and Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, her two advisors for her thesis, and was produced in the two classes set up for senior honors thesis production, American Studies 492 and 493, taught by Professors George Sanchez and Alexis Isfahani-Hammond, in Fall 2007 and Spring 2008 respectively. On Thursday, April 17th, nine of our undergraduate majors presented their Senior Honors Thesis to a standing room only crowd that included faculty, graduate students, undergraduate students, and parents and family. The nine Honors students, along with their thesis titles are: Susan Baxter, “Drugs and the Shaping of 1960s Counter-Culture”; Megan Cadena, “Multiracial Southern Californians and Their Identity in Racialized Neighborhoods”; Eduardo Coronel, “Latino Terms of Identification and Their Meaning for Racial/ Ethnic Identity”; Lilia "Christina" Espinoza, “Representation(s) of Education-seeking Latinos/as in Literature and Popular Culture”; Jeanette Garcia, “Motown and Its Relationship to the Civil Rights Movement”; Joanna Lin, “Asian Food, Cookbooks, and the Commodification of the American Diet”; Paige Reilly, “Grassroots Poets in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s”; Adriana Resendez, “Migration of Women from Guatemala and Their Racial, Ethnic and Class Differences”; Elizabeth Stinnett, “Social Class Pressures and the Molding of a Lifestyle of Extravagance in Southern California.” ASE Achievements & Core AccomplishmentsFebruary/March 2008
ASE FACULTY Ruth Wilson Gilmore received a 2007 Outstanding Book Advancing Human Rights honorable mention from the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights, for her book Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis and Opposition in Globalizing California (University of California Press). Also, she will lecture in three countries during the last two weeks of February. In Lebanon she will present a public lecture, "Understanding The U.S.'s Addiction to Prisons", and several seminars at the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Bin Abdulaziz Al Saud Center for American Studies & Research at the American University of Beirut. She will then travel to Lisbon to present new work at the European Social Science and History Conference, where she has also been invited to participate in a roundtable discussion on the future of cities. Her final stop will be at the London School of Economics where she will present new research at a workshop of engaged international scholars from the global north and south. Sarah Gualtieri has been awarded the ACLS Charles A. Ryskamp Research Fellowship for next year. The title of her project is “The Lebanese in Los Angeles: Migration and Transnationalism in a Multi-racial Landscape.” In addition, Sarah’s article “Becoming ‘White’: The Foundations of Syrian/Lebanese Ethnicity in the United States,” has been republished in a collection of essays entitled “Other Souths: Diversity and Difference in the U.S. South, Reconstruction to the Present” (University of Georgia, 2008). Clara Irazábal published an edited book, Ordinary Places, Extraordinary Events: Democracy, Citizenship, and Public Space in Latin America (New York/ London: Routledge/ Taylor and Francis, 2008), and an article, “Latino Communities in the United States: Place-Making in the Pre-World War II, Post-World War II, and Contemporary City” (with Ramzi Farhat), in the Journal of Planning Literature 22:3 (February 2008). Josh Kun spoke at the Jewish Music Forum in New York on Feb. 22nd on a roundtable panel on “Creating ‘New’ Jewish Sounds.” Maria Elena Martinez gave a talk titled “El discurso de la limpieza de sangre en la Nueva Espana: continuidades y rupturas” at the Colegio de Mexico, Mexico’s most prestigious research institution. It was by invitation and as part of the symposium on the topic “purity of blood” in Mexico and Spain organized by scholars from Mexico, Germany, and South America. Tara McPherson's edited collection, Digital Youth, Innovation and the Unexpected, has just been published by MIT Press. The volume was produced as part of the MacArthur Foundation's Digital Media and Learning Initiative and features work by USC faculty Ellen Seiter, Anne Balsamo and Steve Anderson. She has recently been named as one of three editors of a new MacArthur-sponsored publication, The International Journal of Media and Learning, also from MIT Press. Tara was also appointed to a three-year term as a member of the Cinema Journal editorial board. Over the past several months, Tara has served as an external reviewer of the Humanities division at MIT, where she is a member of the Humanities Visiting Committee, and of the film department of Dartmouth College. In the fall, she served as a reviewer for digital humanities grant competitions for the NEH and for the MacArthur Foundation. Tara recently received a substantial planning grant from the Mellon Foundation to develop a proposal for a multi-university digital hub in support of work in visual culture. She will be working with scholars from Brown, NYU, Rochester and UC-San Diego. The grant is administered through the Institute for Multimedia Literacy. She is also, with Phil Ethington, the recipient of a Zumberge research award for a project exploring new forms of digital publication, analysis, and archiving.
Viet Nguyen has received a fellowship from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study for 2008-2009. His short story, “Someone Else Besides You,” was published in Narrative Magazine (Winter 2008) and is also available online at www.narrativemagazine.com. In January, he went to Seoul to lecture on “The Authenticity of the Anonymous” at a symposium co-organized by Viet Le, transPOP: Korea Vietnam Remix. He has recently been appointed to the Editorial Board of American Literary History, as a Contributing Editor to the Heath Anthology of American Literature, and to the Advisory Board of the Encyclopedia of Asian American Literature from Greenwood Press. Manuel Pastor received two grants recently: the first from the California Community Foundation for the project “What’s Next? Regional Approaches to Immigrant Integration in the Absence of Comprehensive Federal Reform,” ($49,000, 2007-2008); the second was from the Hewlett, Annenberg and Energy Foundations for “Environmental Justice and Climate Change: Understanding the Problem, Considering the Alternatives,” co-PI with James Sadd, Occidental College, and Rachel Morello-Frosch, UC Berkeley, ($210,000). He also published "The Color in Miami: Building Grassroots Leadership in the U.S. Global Justice Movement" (with Tony LoPresti, UCSC), Critical Sociology, 33 (2007): 795-831. This was also a busy period for writing opinion pieces with three being published: “Company Help Banks See Opportunities Amid Challenges,” Los Angeles Business Journal, January 28, 2008; “Wise Advice: Find a Penny, Pick It Up,” with Amy Chubb, Fresno Bee, December 29, 2007; and “The New Electoral Stars,” San Francisco Chronicle, December 5, 2007.
Ricardo Ramirez was profiled by Diverse: Issues In Higher Education as one of 10 emerging scholars under 40 in the publication’s annual edition recognizing rising stars in academe. The Jan. 10 issue includes an article describing Ramírez as having “gained national recognition for his research on the voting and political behavior of individuals across racial and ethnic lines.” In addition, he published (with Matt A. Barretto) a Los Angeles Times opinion piece for February 7, 2008 entitled “The Latino vote is pro-Clinton, not anti-Obama.” George Sanchez delivered the keynote address at the “Connecting Communities: The University and Multi-Ethnic Civic Engagement” Conference at the University of California, Irvine. His address was titled “Challenging the Borders of Civic Engagement: Ethnic Studies and the Meaning of Community Democracy.” He is also very honored to have served as a judge of projects submitted for History Day at the Hollenbeck Middle School in Boyle Heights this month. Ellen Seiter (ASE Affiliated Faculty/ Cinematic Arts) is editing a new book series “Technologies of the Imagination: New Media in Everyday Life” with Digital Culture Books, a collaboration between the University of Michigan Press and Library. The series, co-edited with Mizuko Ito, investigates what it means to be living and growing up in an era saturated with digital media. Through detailed studies of everyday practice, this series will feature work that offers a vivid and grounded perspective on contemporary culture, paying particular attention to the point of view of children and youth. The series, launching Spring 2008, represents an innovative approach to digital publishing and copyright: authors in the series will be licensed under Creative Commons and the books will appear both in print and for free online. Francille Rusan Wilson has been appointed to the Los Angeles Commission on the Status of Women by Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, and was confirmed by the L.A. City Council earlier this month. Wilson will serve a five-year term on the commission, which assists in assuring women have full and equal opportunity to participate in city government and promotes the general welfare of women in Los Angeles. She has also received the Mary McCleod Bethune Excellence in Education Award from Our Authors Study Club, the Los Angeles branch of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History.
ASE Ph.D. STUDENTS Michan Connor, ASE Ph.D. Candidate, has accepted a tenure-track Assistant Professor position with the Interdisciplinary Studies Program in the School of Urban and Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Arlington.
Adam Bush was awarded a $3000 grant from the College Deans Office through their Graduate Professionalization Initiative to present a performance this semester (with Ruthie's urging and financial support) of a premier of a piece by artists/musicians/poets Dwight Trible and Kamau Daood, celebrating African American community arts in Los Angeles.
Jeb Middlebrook published the chapter "Run-DMC" in the 2007 Greenwood Press Icons Series book Icons of Hip Hop: An Encyclopedia of the Movement, Music, and Culture. The chapter situates the rap-rock group Run-DMC as pivotal to the crossover appeal of a contemporary Black aesthetic. Middlebrook also wrote the chapter "Rhyme and Reason: The Making of a White Anti-Racist Rap Group" in the forthcoming book and charitable project Struggling for Direction: White Anti-Racism and Accountability to be published by Crandall, Dostie & Douglass Books, Inc. "Rhyme and Reason" analyzes Middlebrook's experiences as a performance artist and solidarity activist, and provides lessons for multiracial alliances and movement building. The proceeds from Struggling for Direction will fund the post-Katrina rebuilding of the People's Institute for Survival and Beyond, a nationally recognized anti-racism training and organizing institution based in New Orleans. Middlebrook also recently accepted two invitations to perform and lecture at Yale University on "Creating Anti-Racist Culture on Campus", to lecture at Loyola Marymount University on "Introduction to Whiteness Studies", and to perform and keynote at the Privilege and Identity Conference at the University of San Diego and the White Privilege Conference sponsored by the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs.
Micaela Smith successfully completed the Los Angeles Marathon on Sunday, March 2, 2008 with the support of her family and friends.
Anthony Sparks, ASE Doctoral student, has been nominated for a 2008 NAACP Image Award. He is nominated in the category Outstanding Writing for a Dramatic Series for his work on the television series Lincoln Heights. Specifically, the nomination is for his work as the writer, along with the executive producer, on the show's season two finale, entitled "The Vision". "The Vision" tells the story of a young visual artist's attempt to intervene in a (fictional) city's gang war.
November/December 2007
The third annual Faculty Scholarly Productivity Index has ranked the USC Department of American Studies and Ethnicity in fifth place among American Studies Ph.D. programs and departments in the nation. Our department is the highest ranked department at USC, along with Music, Oceanography, Public Health, and Family and Human Sciences. This index can be found at: http://chronicle.com/stats/productivity
ASE FACULTY Bill Deverell, ASE affiliate faculty member, won a 2007 General Education Teaching Award from the College of Letters, Arts & Sciences. Rosa-Linda Fregoso has just signed an advanced contract with Duke University Press for a book to be co-editing with Cynthia Bejarano entitled, Gender Terrorism: Feminicides in the Américas. Macarena Gómez-Barris has had two articles recently published in peer-reviewed journals: “Torture Sees and Seeks: Guillermo Núñez’s Art in Chile’s Transition,” ContraCoriente: A Journal of Social History and Literature, Fall. 5:1 (Fall 2007), pp. 86-107; and (with Clara Irázabal), 2007, “Bounded Tourism: Immigrant Politics, Consumption, and Traditions at Plaza Mexico,” Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change, 5:3 (November 2007), pp. 186-213. Jane Iwamura has won the 2007 Raubenheimer Junior Faculty Award for showing unusual promise in the areas of research, teaching, and service to the University. This is the highest award of recognition for all aspects of faculty life that the College awards to junior faculty. Lanita Jacobs-Huey also won a 2007 General Education Teaching Award from the College of Letters, Arts & Sciences. Recipients are chosen on the basis of course statistical evaluations and student comments on evaluation forms, course syllabi, and evidence of rigorous grading.
Kara Keeling’s book, The Witch's Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense, has been published by Duke University Press and is now available for purchase and classroom use.
Robin D. G. Kelley’s book Yo Mama’s DisFunktional!: Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America was translated into Japanese by Kosuzu Abe and Katsuyaki Murata and released this year by Hanmoto Publishers (2007). It includes a new foreword by Kelly written specifically for Japanese readers. Kelley was invited to take up the Visiting Harmsworth Chair at Oxford University (St. Catherine’s College), for the academic year 2009-10.
Dorinne Kondo received a Humanities and Social Sciences grant from USC for her book in progress (Re)visions of Race. The work combines scholarly and creative writing and focuses on issues of race and performance in the plays of Anna Deavere Smith, Culture Clash, and David Henry Hwang. This past summer, she was involved in fieldwork with Hwang's “Yellow Face,” that had its world premiere at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, and in December she will go to its New York premiere at the Public Theater in New York, where NYU A/P/A Studies will film a post-play interview she will conduct with playwright Hwang. In November, she speaks at the conference "Embracing Diversity," the 10th year anniversary of the founding of the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at Stanford, and she will doing dramaturgy for Anna Deavere Smith’s new play “Let Me Down Easy,” for its New York workshop and for the production at the Long Wharf Theater in New Haven. Hand issues--cubital tunnel--are still a problem, but she has nonetheless returned to playwriting. A substantially revised Act One of her play "Seamless" was read at Moving Arts Theatre in Los Angeles in August. A reading of the entire play will occur in the spring. Josh Kun published "How We Listen," a dialogue with renowned conductor and Bard College president Leon Botstein about the nature of listening to music in the fall 2007 issue of Guilt & Pleasure Quarterly. Kun and Botstein discussed how listening is affected by being present at a live performance or listening to a recording. He also published "Abie The Fishman: On Masks, Birthmarks, and Hunchbacks" in the Duke University Press book Listen Again: A Momentary History of Pop Music. This essay theorizes the history of Jewish musical masquerade and follows the footsteps of a certain Abie The Fishman, from The Marx Brothers to Bob Dylan (with quick stops at Van Halen, Al Jolson, and Woody Allen along the way). Finally, he organized a conversation with playwright Aaron Davidman in conjunction with The Sundance Institute Theatre Program's work-in-progress reading of “A Jerusalem Between Us,” his play about America, Israel and a question of conscience, directed by Philip Himberg. This new play takes stock of recent controversies that have divided Americans and American Jews. The play untangles the Rachel Corrie controversy, considers the word ‘apartheid’ reflects on the spirit of Jewish values and wonders what’s left of the Left. Giving voice to different characters he meets along his journey, one man travels from America to the Middle East in search for answers to some of the most provocative questions of our time.
ASE Ph.D. STUDENTS Viet Le has won a General Education Graduate Assistant Award for teaching during the 2006-2007 academic year. During that year, Viet taught with Sarah Gualtieri and Leland Saito for AMST 101. This distinction comes with a thousand dollars and a certificate. Viet will also be a roundtable participant at the “Southeast Asians in the Diaspora” Conference to be held at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign on April 15-16, 2008. This two-day conference examines the emerging field of Southeast Asian/American studies, and will be held to coincide with the Association of Asian American Studies (AAAS) conference in Chicago from April 16-20, 2008. Ulli Ryder is the 2007-08 Graduate Student in Residence for Diversity Outreach at the USC Graduate School. In this role, she helps coordinate the recruitment of under-represented students to graduate programs at USC and assists current USC graduate students to navigate their way through to the completion of their degrees.
ASE UNDERGRADUATE MAJORS/MINORS Joanna Lin is a senior majoring in American Studies and Ethnicity and is currently the editor of the Daily Trojan. She is also writing a senior thesis in American Studies and Ethnicity on ethnofood politics under the supervision of Viet Nguyen.
October 2007ASE FACULTY Josh Kun was just named co-editor (with Ron Radano) of the "Re-Figuring American Music" book series at Duke University Press. He also just published an article on Mexico City rock band Cafe Tacuba in The New York Times on October 14, 2007. He has sponsored various events and projects through his directorship of The Popular Music Project at The Norman Lear Center (www.usc.edu/pmp), and recently participated in a panel for a "Hip Hop America" event through “Visions and Voices” on October 8th. His upcoming talks include presenting research on Tijuana arts and culture at The Haudenschild Garage in San Diego, as part of their Fuel4Talk series, with photographer Yvonne Venegas and architect/theorist Teddy Cruz; discussing globalization and art with Mexico City artist Carlos Amorales at the Art Forum of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University; and giving a lecture at Dartmouth titled "My Name was José Jiménez: The Afterlife of a Joke," at the No Laughing Matter: Visual Humor in Ideas of Race, Nationality, and Ethnicity Institute conference. Jane Naomi Iwamura has published "Ancestral Returns: Reexamining the Horizons of Asian American Religious Practice," in Off the Menu: Asian and Asian North American Women's Theology and Religion, eds., Rita Nakashima Brock, Jung Ha Kim, Kwok Puilan, and Seung Ai Yang, (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2007), 107-121, and (with Janelle Wong) "The Model Minority: Race, Religion and Conservative Politics among Asian Americans," Religion and Social Justice for Immigrants, ed. Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Univ. Press, 2007): 35-49. She has also received a 2007 project grant (with AMST Affiliate Faculty, Diane Winston) from the College Initiative on Interdisciplinary Projects, Programs and Centers, for "Interdisciplinary Program for the Study of Faith in High Definition." Roberto Lint-Sagarena has two books now under contract: (1) his monograph, Arcadia and Aztlán: Religion, Ethnicity and the Creation of History (New York University Press); and (2) a survey of Latino/a Religions in the United States (Praeger). Clara Irazábal’s article, “Latino Communities in the United States: Place-Making in the Pre-World War II, Post-World War II, and Contemporary City” (with Ramzi Farhat) was accepted for publication in the Journal of Planning Literature 22.3, forthcoming February 2008. Her edited book, Ordinary Places, Extraordinary Events: Democracy, Citizenship, and Public Space in Latin America (New York/London: Routledge/Taylor and Francis) is forthcoming January 15, 2008. George J. Sánchez was honored as the first professor to be tapped by the 2007-2008 Mortar Board Class, USC’s chapter of the premier national undergraduate senior honor society. He has also recently been appointed to the National Advisory Board of Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life. In addition, he was asked to serve as chair of the first Committee on Graduate Education of the American Studies Association. Nelly P. Stromquist authored Feminist Organizations and Social Transformation in Latin America (Boulder: Paradigm Publishers) in 2006, along with editing two recent books: The Professoriate in the Age of Globalization (Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, 2007) and La construcción del género en las políticas públicas: Perspectivas comparadas desde América Latina (Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 2006). In addition, she has published nine refereed articles and eleven chapters in books since 2006. Karen Tongson published her essay, “The Light That Never Goes Out: Butch Intimacies in Lesser Los Angeles” in the Blackwell Companion to LGBT Studies (eds. Haggerty and McGarry), as well as a review essay for the International Journal of Communication on Elana Levine’s book, Wallowing in Sex: The Sexual Culture of 1970s American Television in Fall 2007. She¹s also been on the road delivering a range of invited lectures, keynotes and plenary addresses at Johns Hopkins University, New York University (For the “After CBGB, Now What?: Gender, Sexuality and the Future of Subculture” symposium), Swarthmore College (for the Sager Symposium), UC Santa Cruz, UC Riverside and the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Back at the USC campus, Karen was recently elected to the College Faculty Council and received a Provost¹s Arts and Humanities Initiative Grant for a series of performances, titled “RECORDS y Recuerdos: Music and Memory in East L.A.” (featuring The Butchlalis de Panochtitlan in “THE BARBER OF EAST L.A.” directed by Luis Alfaro, and a retrospective of the artist, Hector Silva’s work at ONE, the National Gay and Lesbian Archives). On November 1, 2007, in collaboration with Alexandra Vazquez at Yale and Christine Bacareza Balance at UCR, Karen is launching a web magazine/blog about pop music and the culture industry titled OH! INDUSTRY (http://ohindustry.blogspot.com). Francille Rusan Wilson was awarded the Letitia Woods Brown Memorial Book Prize by the Association of Black Women Historians for the best book in African American women’s history for her book, The Segregated Scholars: Black Social Scientists and the Creation of Black Labor Studies, 1890-1950. She was also re-elected to 3rd three-year term on Executive Council of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (2008-2010), and is a member of the selection committee for the Herbert Gutman Dissertation Prize, co-sponsored by the Labor and Working Class History Association and University of Illinois Press, for the outstanding Ph.D. dissertation in labor and working-class history defended during the 2006-2007 academic year. This fall, she was a speaker at the History Workshop at the University of Delaware, and delivered an OAH Distinguished Lecture at the University of Alabama in Huntsville on “The History of the Black History Movement: Carter G. Woodson’s Great Cause.” Janelle Wong has received two major research grants to fund her project, "Faithful Coalitions: Immigrants and Conservative Christian Politics”: a Russell Sage Foundation Award; and a USC Provost Initiative on Immigration and Integration Project Grant; her collaborator is Jane Iwamura. ASE Ph.D. STUDENTS Michelle D. Commander published an article in the June 2007 issue of American Quarterly: "Ghana at Fifty: Moving Toward Kwame Nkrumah's Pan-African Dream," pp. 421-441. Her travel to complete the fieldwork for this article was fully funded by a USC College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences' Diversity Placement Assistance (DPA) grant, which she received in early February 2007.
Nicole Hodges Persley had three articles recently published this year, "A Timeline of Hip Hop History " in Icons of Hip-hop: An Encyclopedia of the Movement, Music and Culture (Westport: Greenwood Press, June 2007), Performance Review "The Color Purple" Theatre Journal (forthcoming December 2007), and Performance Review "The Watts Tower Project" Theatre Journal (December 2007).
Hillary Jenks will have her article, "The Politics of Preservation: Power, Memory, and Identity in an Historic Ethnic Neighborhood," published in Cultural Landscapes: Balancing Nature and Heritage in Preservation Practice. The collection, edited by Richard Longstreth, is forthcoming from the University of Minnesota Press in April 2008.
Anthony Rodriguez, second year ASE Ph.D. student, is also is currently on a Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship. He, along with Michelle Commander, Abigail Rosas, Genevieve Carpio, and Chrisshona Grant, all recently attended the 2007 Ford Fellows Conference, making up the largest contingent of current Ford Fellows from any single doctoral program in the nation.
Anthony Sparks was a reciepient of the 2006-2007 Walt Disney Studios/ABC Entertainment Writing Fellowship. The extremely competitive fellowship, which selects up to 10 fellows from approximately 2,500 entries, is considered among the most prestigious of fellowships in the entertainment industry and includes a $50,000 award. Sparks is also a writer for the ABC Family television series, "Lincoln Heights", currently the only (and historically one of the few) television drama series on network or basic cable with a predominantly African-American cast. Terrion L. Williamson, J.D., was recently named a 2007-2008 Fellow at USC's Center for Law, History and Culture. She was also a Fellow during the 2006-2007 school year. Yushi Yamazaki obtained a Fulbright scholarship and joined ASE this year. Karen Yonemoto was awarded the FTE North American Dissertation Fellowship, for the second time (2006-07; 2007-08), in addition to her Haynes Dissertation Fellowship. This fellowship supports graduate students of color who conduct research on religion.
September 2007ASE FACULTY Five members of the core faculty of the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity were recipients of 2007 USC-Mellon Excellence in Mentoring Awards, more than any other individual department unit at the university. Under the category “Faculty Mentoring Graduate Students,” the recipients were Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Stanley Huey, Jr., Ricardo Ramirez, and George J. Sanchez. Under the category “Faculty Mentoring Undergraduate Students,” the recipient was David Roman. In addition, David won an award for his mentoring work with junior faculty in the College.
In academic year 2006-07, two assistant professors in the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity, Sarah Gualtieri and Alexandra Isfahani-Hammond, won Zumberge Research Grants to support their ongoing research projects.
Sarah Banet-Weiser had two books published in the last few weeks: Kids Rule!: Nickelodeon and Consumer Citizenship (Duke University Press, 2007) and Cable Visions: Television Beyond Broadcasting, eds. Sarah Banet-Weiser, Cynthia Chris and Anthony Freitas (NYU Press, 2007).
Ruth Wilson Gilmore was elected to the national board of the American Studies Association for a three-year term. She also was a recipient of a 2007 USC-Mellon Excellence in Mentoring Award for the category “Faculty Mentoring Graduate Students.”
Clara Irazábal published five articles in 2007: “Kitsch is Dead, Long Live Kitsch: The Production of Hyperkitsch in Las Vegas” (Journal of Architectural and Planning Research); “Neighborhoods in the Lead: Grassroots Planning for Social Transformation in Post-Katrina New Orleans?” (Planning Practice & Research, with Jason Neville); “Urban Design as a Catalyst for Social Change: A Comparative Look at Modernism and New Urbanism” (Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review, with Michael Vanderbeek); “Entertainment-Retail Centers in Hong Kong and Los Angeles: Trends and Lessons” International Planning Studies, with Surajit Chakravarty); and “Bounded Tourism: Immigrant Politics, Consumption, and Traditions in Plaza Mexico” (Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change, with Macarena Gómez-Barris). Her book, City Making and Urban Governance in the Americas: Curitiba and Portland (2005), was featured by Ashgate in its 2007 40th-anniversary poster called "Ashgate's Top 40 at 40", which presented Ashgate's top 40 human geography titles. Irazábal's work on ethnic and Latino communities in Los Angeles—supported by an Urban Initiative grant, a Pew grant (managed by the Center for Religious and Civic Culture), and an Immigration and Integration grant—has received significant attention by the media. This year she was commissioned an op-ed piece (Los Angeles Times, with Grace Dyrness), and has been interviewed for several newspapers (New York Times, Nguoi Viet [Vietnamese newspaper], Nueva Magazine); online news services (Reuters); radio (Morning Edition—National Public Radio); and TV news programs (News Extra—KNBC TV channel 4; En Contexto—T52 Telemundo).
Alexandra Isfahani-Hammond finished her book, to be published in December 2007: White Negritude: Race, Writing and Brazilian Cultural Identity (Palgrave-Macmillan, “New Concepts in Latino American Cultures,” December, 2007). She was also interviewed for a broadcast on NPR which will air some time in the next couple of months, with the subject: “African Diaspora Literature in Brazil and Cuba.” National Public Radio/Modern Language Association Program entitled “What’s the Word?” Finally, she received a General Education Course Enhancement Award in summer 2007 for a course proposal on Greater Caribbean literatures and cultures.
Jane Iwamura published “Critical Faith: Japanese Americans and the Birth of a New Civil Religion,” in the September 2007 special issue of the American Quarterly, entitled "Religion and Politics in the Contemporary United States," guest edited by Marie Griffith and Melani McAlister.
Curtis Marez recently completed his first year of editing American Quarterly, and is particularly proud of the special issue entitled "Religion and Politics in the Contemporary United States," guest edited by Marie Griffith and Melani McAlister. In addition, he published “Looking Beyond Property: Native Americans and Photography,” Rikkyo American Studies Journal, Institute of American Studies, Rikkyo University, Tokyo, Japan (2007); and “Mestizo,” Keywords of American Cultural Studies, ed. Bruce Burgett and Glenn Hendler (forthcoming, NYU Press). Viet Nguyen published “Impossible to Forget, Difficult to Remember: Vietnam and the Art of Dinh Q. Le” in the Bellevue Arts Museum catalogue A Tapestry of Memories: The Art of Dinh Q. Lê. His story “A Correct Life” was published in Best New American Voices 2007, and another story, “The Other Woman,” won the 2007 Fiction Prize from Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and the Fine Arts, where it will be published this fall. He also won a residency from the Djerassi Resident Artists Program in Woodside, CA, for May 2008, and this past summer, he went to Japan on a grant from the Japan-United States Friendship Commission to present lectures at five Japanese universities. Manuel Pastor was successful at obtaining two new grants, one from the Ford Foundation called “Just Growth: Linking Regional Equity and Regional Economic Development,” (with Chris Benner, UC Davis), $340,000, grant period 2007-2009, and a subcontract from the University of California, Berkeley, “Building Resilient Regions: Data Analysis and Network Participation,” part of a larger MacArthur Foundation project entitled “Building Resilient Regions” (PI – Margaret Weir), subcontract: $315,842, 2007-2009. He published Staircases or Treadmills: Labor Market Intermediaries and Economic Opportunity in a Changing Economy, with Chris Benner and Laura Leete, (Russell Sage Press, 2007) and the forthcoming article, "The Color in Miami: Building Grassroots Leadership in the U.S. Global Justice Movement" (with Tony LoPresti, UCSC), forthcoming, Critical Sociology. He was also co-author on Still Toxic After All These Years: Air Quality and Environmental Justice in the San Francisco Bay Area (with James Sadd and Rachel Morello-Frosh), a report that had a significant media splash in the Bay Area and led to several presentations before key policy makers and community leaders. Laura Pulido’s most recent book, Black, Brown, Yellow and Left: Radical Activism in Los Angeles has won the 2007 Meridian Book Award for the Outstanding Scholarly Book in Geography from the Association of American Geographers. Last year, it also won a Phi Kappa Phi Faculty Recognition Award. David Román and Richard Meyer coedited a special double-issue of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, entitled "Art Works," which featured over twenty contributors writing about the role of the literary, visual, and performing arts in queer culture and history. David also published an essay, "Remembering AIDS: A Reconsideration of the film Longtime Companion," in the volume. He also published a series of reviews including reviews of Hecuba by Euripides at the Royal Shakespeare Company and Electricidad by Luis Alfaro at the Mark Taper Forum in Aztlan: A Journal of Chicano Studies 31:1 (2006) and and a review of the American Songbook Recital by Audra McDonald at Lincoln Center in Theatre Journal 57:4 (2006), a special issue on "Black Performance" edited by Harry Elam Jr. In addition, the American Society for Theatre Research (ASTR) held a special plenary session on his book, Performance in America: Contemporary US Culture and the Performing Arts, at their 2006 national conference. In 2007 he won two USC-Mellon Awards for Excellence in Mentoring, the first award was for his work with ASE undergraduate students and the second award was for his work with the junior faculty in the College. George J. Sánchez completed two reports in Summer 2007, “The History of Segregation in Los Angeles: A Report on Racial Discrimination and Its Legacy,” for Scheff & Washington, PC, in the legal case American Civil Rights Foundation v. Los Angeles Unified School District, Superior Court of California, County of Los Angeles, Central Division (2007), and “Confronting a Crisis in the Historical Profession” on racial/ethnic diversity in the historical profession, which will appear in the American Historical Association Perspectives in October 2007. In addition, his comments on a roundtable on “Regionalism: The Significance of Place in American Jewish Life,” were published in American Jewish History (June 2007). In 2006, he delivered the George A.V. Dunning Lecture for the Historical Society of Southern California, and in 2007, he was awarded a USC-Mellon Mentoring Award for Mentoring Graduate Students, and an Advancing Scholarship in the Humanities and Social Sciences Grant of $25,000 from the USC Office of the Provost. He has also recently been appointed to the National Advisory Board of Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life.
ASE Ph.D. STUDENTS Daniel HoSang has won the 2007 Ralph Henry Gabriel Dissertation Prize from the American Studies Association for the best dissertation produced in the field during the last academic year for his dissertation, “Racial Propositions: Genteel Apartheid in Postwar California.” He will be presented with his prize at the annual awards ceremony of the American Studies Association conference in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania at the Philadelphia Marriott on Friday, October 12, 2007 at 7 pm. Laura Pulido was his major advisor and chair of his dissertation committee. Viet Le has won an Anna Bing Arnold Fellowship from the USC Graduate School and a Fulbright Fellowship to Vietnam for academic year 2007-08. The John Randolph Haynes and Dora Haynes Foundation awards ten dissertation fellowships a year to doctoral students in the social sciences from Caltech, the Claremont Graduate University, UCLA, UC Irvine, UC Riverside and USC. In 2007-08, three students from the Ph.D. program of the Department of American Studies & Ethnicity won these fellowships, the most from any department at any of these universities. These three Ph.D. students are Wendy Cheng, Phuong Nguyen, and Karen Yonemoto. Two ASE Ph.D. students were awarded Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellowships in 2007, which include three years of support for their doctoral work. These students are incoming Ph.D. student Genevieve Carpio and second year student Chrisshona Grant. They join Abigail Rosas, third year student in ASE, who won this Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship in 2006.
Michelle D. Commander was awarded a Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellowship for academic year 2007-2008.
Hillary Jenks was awarded a USC College Final Year Dissertation Fellowship for 2007-08. Both Daniel HoSang and Jennifer Stoever were awarded USC College Final Summer Dissertation Fellowships for Summer 2007. In addition, entering student Adam Bush was awarded a USC College Doctoral Fellowship. ASE UNDERGRADUATE MAJORS/MINORS
Chris Ferguson, a 2005 USC Renaissance Scholar who majored in American Studies & Ethnicity, was accepted to UC-Berkeley's Ph.D. program in African American Studies and begins his graduate studies this fall. David Román was his undergraduate advisor.
2006-2007ASE faculty celebrate the release of five new books!
Performance in America by David Román (Duke University Press)
Black, Brown, Yellow, and Left by Laura Pulido (University of California Press)
From the Kitchen to the Parlor by Lanita Jacobs-Huey (Oxford University Press)
Democracy's Promise by Janelle Wong (University of Michigan Press)
Golden Gulag by Ruth Wilson Gilmore (University of California Press)
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