2012 News & Events

ASE FACULTY

Felix Gutierrez, Professor of Journalism, Communication and American Studies and Ethnicity, was 2011 recipient of the top diversity award in journalism and mass communication education: the Lionel C. Barrow Jr. Award for Distinguished Achievement in Diversity Research and Education of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC).  The award, jointly supported by AEJMC’s Minorities and Communication (MAC) Division and the Commission on the Status of Minorities (CSM), recognizes oustanding individual accomplishment and leadership in diversity efforts for unerrepresented groups by race and ethnicity.  The award was presented at AEJMC’s annual convention in St. Louis, where Gutierrez was also the keynote speaker at the luncheon honoring the 40th anniversary of the founding of the MAC Division.

Dorinne Kondo, Director of Asian American Studies (2011-12) was Distinguished  Visiting Scholar, Dept. of Gender Studies, Chinese University of Hong Kong, giving five lectures and seminars for faculty, students, and the general public.  Her play Seamless received two readings at the prestigious Lark Theatre/ Development center in New York, one directed by Victor Maog and one directed by Eric Ting, Associate Artistic Director at the Long Wharf Theatre, a major regional theater located in New Haven. It also received multiple readings through playwriting workshops: three in 2011, one in 2012 and one more upcoming this June. Each reading represents a revision of the play. She was a dramaturg for two iterations of Marcos Najera’s Brown Oxygen/ Oxigeno at Highways Performance Space. Kondo is writing a book on the production and materialization of race in theater; working title: Creative Difference(s).  She continues as a board member of Cultural Dynamics: Insurgent Scholarship on culture, Politics and Power and served as an Expert consultant for the Mellon Fellows faculty book manuscript workshop at Duke’s Franklin Institute of the Humanities.  Her student Todd Honma received his Ph.D. last year and won a UC Chancellor’s Fellowship and a position as Assistant Prof. of Asian American Studies at Pitzer College. Two other students, Anthony Sparks and Nisha Kunte, will be receiving their Ph.D.s this May.

Prof. María Elena Martínez was awarded a 2012-2013 Fulbright Scholars Fellowship to conduct research in Mexico for her current book project, tentatively titled The Enlightened Creole Science of Race: Naturalizing the Body in the Eighteenth-Century Spanish Atlantic World. Her first book, Genealogical Fictions: Limpieza de Sangre, Religion, and Gender in Colonial Mexico (Stanford University Press, 2008), received the American Historical Association’s James A. Rawley Prize in Atlantic History as well as the prize for best 2008 book in Mexican history, awarded by the American Historical Association’s Conference on Latin American History. Her recent articles include “Indigenous Genealogies: Lineage, History, and the Colonial Pact in Central Mexico and Peru,” in Indigenous Intellectuals: Knowledge, Power, and Colonial Culture, ed. Yanna Yannakakis and Gabriela Ramos (Duke, forthcoming 2013); and “The Language, Genealogy, and Classification of ‘Race’ in Colonial Mexico,” in Race and Classification: The Case of Mexican America (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009).

Prof. Martínez was the primary academic advisor for the PBS Documentary “When Worlds Collide,” on the early modern Spanish empire and the cultures of Spanish America, which premiered on September 27, 2010. http://www.pbs.org/kcet/when-worlds-collide/. She was also interviewed in the BBC Documentary on “How the World Got Mixed Up,” which aired internationally in fall 2011.

Viet Nguyen is a fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies for 2011-2012, and was a Luce Foundation Fellow of the Asian Cultural Council in 2010. He also received a Grant for Artistic Innovation from the Center for Cultural Innovation, as well as an Arts and Humanities Initiative Grant with Sunyoung Lee and Sumi Pendakur to stage Inside/Out, a transpacific and diaspora writers event in April 2012. With Janet Hoskins, he received a three-year, $200,000 grant from the Luce Foundation to continue developing their Center for Transpacific Studies. His short story “Fatherland” appeared in Narrative (June 2011) while another story, “The Americans,” was a finalist for the Nelson Algren Prize and appeared in the Chicago Tribune (Dec. 2010). The Asian American Literary Review published his essay “War, Memory and the Future” (vol. 1, no. 2, 2010). USC presented him with a Mellon Mentoring Award for mentoring graduate students in 2011. He also gave ten invited lectures, six of them in Korea and Taiwan.

Manuel Pastor has secured several grants in 2011 and  2012, including  a grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York to study naturalization, a National Science Foundation grant to research toxics and environmental justice , a Surdna Foundation grant (in collaboration with the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy and Green for All) to study green jobs in manufacturing, a grant from Evelyn and Walter Haas, Jr. Fund to develop an immigrant integration scorecard for California’s regions, a Ford Foundation grant to study the metrics of social movements, a California Community Foundation grant to facilitate the Los Angeles Council on Immigrant Integration and build  a network of Southern California immigration researchers, , a James Irvine Foundation grant to research California’s social movements, a U.S. EPA grant to develop and test an environmental justice screening method, and an Atlantic Philanthropies grant to build university-based infrastructure to research and support social movements.  Publications in this period include Just Growth: Prosperity and Inclusion in America’s Metropolitan Regions (with Chris Benner), Routledge Press, 2011, and articles on climate justice in Climatic Change, on environmental justice in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, on community capacity for participation in decision-making in the American Journal of Public Health, and on regional equity and social movement organizing in Urban Affairs Review and the Journal of the Community Development Society. As well, he authored or –coauthored book chapters in books published by the Brookings Institution, Oxford University Press, the University of California Press and the Lincoln Land Institute on topics such as immigrant integration, spatial assimilation, and coalition-building for social change. He also co-authored reports such as L.A. RISING: The 1992 Civil Unrest, the Arc of Social Justice Organizing, and the Lessons for Today’s Movement Building , America’s Tomorrow: Equity is the Superior Growth Model (with PolicyLink in Oakland) , Empowering LA’s Solar Workforce:New Policies that New Policies that Deliver Investments and Jobs (with colleagues at UCLA), and Transactions, Transformations, Translations: Metrics That Matter for Building, Scaling, and Funding Social Movements, and All Together Now? African Americans, Immigrants, and the Future of California (with Juan de Lara of ASE).  He also placed opinion pieces in the Los Angeles Times, the San Jose Mercury News, the Huffington Post, and other venues, and gave keynote speeches to the Michigan Land and Prosperity Summit, the Mile High Connects conference in Denver, Colorado, the Annual Conference of the Funders Network for Smart Growth and Livable Communities in Seattle, Washington, the 2012 Grantmakers Retreat for Funders for LGBTQ Issues in Miami, Florida, the Transformative Regional Engagement Roundtable Annual Meeting in Washington, DC, the annual conference of the University Council for Educational Administration in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the Kids Count Conference sponsored by the Annie E. Casey Foundation in Baltimore, Maryland, the annual Grantmakers in the Arts conference in San Francisco, California, the 2011 California Higher Education Sustainability Conference in Long Beach, California, the Connecticut Council for Philanthropy, and the University of San Diego’s Seventh Annual Nonprofit Governance Symposium, as well as invited major lectures at UCLA, Stanford, Duke University, Whittier College, and the University of Texas- San Antonio.

Shana Redmond received a Woodrow Wilson Career Enhancement Fellowship for Junior Faculty for 2011-2012. At the 2011 ASA conference in Baltimore, she was awarded the Comparative Ethnic Studies Prize for her paper, “Manifold Music: On Markets and the Limits of Racial Exchange,” a work-in-progress drawn from her second book project. In December 2011, her article, “This Safer Space: Janelle Monáe’s ‘Cold War’,”was published in the Journal of Popular Music Studies. March conference travels took her to Toronto, New York City, San Diego, and South Bend, IN, and in April she was a speaker on “The Politics of Popular Music” panel at the L.A. Times Festival of Books along with ASE faculty and Affiliates Josh Kun, Alice Echols, and Karen Tongson. She was recently named a New Directions in Feminist Scholarship Fellow for 2012-2013 and will use her time in the seminar “Gender, Race, Sexuality and the Politics of Popular Music” (directed by Karen Tongson and hosted by the Center for Feminist Research at USC) to further explore the role of music and culture within global aid productions. This summer she will participate in the “Decolonizing Knowledge and Power: Postcolonial Studies, Decolonial Horizons” seminar in Barcelona, sponsored by UC-Berkeley and the Center of Study and Investigation for Global Dialogues in Spain.

John Carlos Rowe has published several new books in the past two years, including Afterlives of Modernism: Liberalism, Transnationalism, and Political Critique (Dartmouth Press, 2011) and The Cultural Politics of the New American Studies (Open Humanities Press/ University of Michigan Libraries, 2012), which is a digital only book in the open access mode. He also edited A Concise Companion to American Studies (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), co-edited with Winfried Fluck and Donald E. Pease Re-Framing the Transnational Turn in American Studies (Dartmouth Press, 2011), and co-edited with Eric Haralson A Historical Guide to Henry James (Oxford University Press, 2012). In November 2011, he was Distinguished Visiting Professor at the American University Cairo, where he delivered the Edward Said Memorial Lecture, “American Orientalism after Edward Said,” and another public lecture, “Arabia Fantasia: U.S. Literary Culture and the Middle East.” Currently on sabbatical, he has just completed a memoir, “Autobiography of Carlos.”

ASE GRADUATE STUDENTS

Congratulations to Celeste Menchaca, Amee Chew, Analena Hassberg, and Treva Ellison for passing their qualifying exam in academic year 2011-12.

Congratulations to Nisha Kunte, Anthony Sparks, Jesus Hernandez, Micaela Smith, Thang Dao,  and Viet Le for successfully defended in academic year 2011-12.

David Stein published the chapter, “Black Freedom Struggles and African American Identity” IN 2011 in the Routledge Handbook of Identity Studies. (London and New York: Routledge, 2011), 307-324.

Alvaro Marquez received a USC’s Center for Religion and Civic Culture(CRCC) 2012 Interdisciplinary Research Group Travel and Research Grant.  In addition, Alvaro was selected by the Woodrow Wilson Foundation to receive the 2012 Dissertation Research Grant.

Celeste Menchaca received a 2012 summer research grant from the USC Dornsife Research Cluster in Science, Technolog and Society.

Huibin “Amee” Chew received a 2012 Fulbright Fellowship.  Amee will spend nine months in the Philippines collaborating on a research project with General Assembly Binding Women for Reforms, Integrity, Equality, Leadership and Action (GABRIELA).  Dornsife News: /news/stories/1177/thats-right-you-earned-a-fulbright/

ASE PH.D. ALUMNI

Daniel Martinez HoSang received his PhD in American Studies and Ethnicity in August 2007 under the direction of Laura Pulido. His book Racial Propositions: Ballot Initiatives and the Making of Postwar California (Univ of California Press, 2010) examines California’s history of racialized ballot measures in the post World War II era to unearth the tangled roots of contemporary “color blind” racial politics. It was awarded the 2011 James Rawley Prize of the Organization of American Historians for the best book on the history of race relations. The book was based on a dissertation he wrote at ASE that won awards from the American Studies Association, the American Political Science Association, and the Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association.  He is currently an Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies and Political Science at the University of Oregon, where he teaches classes on racial politics, history and theory

Mark Padoonpatt has accepted a position as assistant professor of Multidisciplinary Studies in the Interdisciplinary Degree Program at University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

Emily Hobson has accepted a position as assistant professor of Women’s Studies and History in the Gender, Race and Identity Studies Program at the University of Nevada, Reno.

Laura Fugikawa has accepted a position as visiting assistant professor in the Gender and Women’s Studies and Asian American Studies at University of Illinois Chicago.

Viet Le has accepted the Academia Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Institute of European and American Studies in Taipei, Taiwan.

Michan Connor will serve as a 2012-2013 Visiting Scholar at the James Weldon Johnson Institute, where he will be investigating the historical development and the future prospects of political fragmentation in metropolitan Atlanta.

Imani Johnson is finishing a 3-year postdoctoral fellowship at NYU, Dept. of Performance Studies.

Todd Honma completed his Ph.D. in 2011, received a UC Chancellor’s Fellowship, and has a tenure-track position in Asian American Studies at Pitzer College.

Nisha Kunte will be teaching at UCSD Ethnic Studies and UC Irvine, Asian American Studies, next year.

ASE UNDERGRADUATE STUDENTS

Nelly Chávez received a 2012 Fulbright Fellowship.  Nelly, who recently earned her bachelor’s in American studies and ethnicity, and French, with a minor in Latin American studies in USC Dornsife, will teach English to high school students in Madrid, Spain. Her faculty mentor is Professor Maria Elena Martinez.  Dornsife News: /news/stories/1177/thats-right-you-earned-a-fulbright/