Spotlight

2019 USC ASE Faculty

Evelyn Alsultany is a leading expert on the history of representations of Arabs and Muslims in the U.S. media and on forms of anti-Arab and anti-Muslim racism. Alsultany is the author of Arabs and Muslims in the Media: Race and Representation after 9/11 (New York University Press, 2012) and co-editor of Arab and Arab American Feminisms: Gender, Violence, and Belonging (Syracuse University Press, 2011) and Between the Middle East and the Americas: The Cultural Politics of Diaspora (University of Michigan Press, 2013).

Adrian De Leon is a Abagatan (Southern) Ilokano poet, historian, and essayist. His research and creative practice explore Philippine indigeneity and migrant labor from the 19^th century to World War II. He is the author of Rouge (2018) and barangay (forthcoming, 2021), and co-editor of FEEL WAYS: A Scarborough Anthology (2020). He is an Assistant Professor of American Studies & Ethnicity at the University of Southern California, and a faculty member of the Center for Transpacific Studies.

Oneka LaBennett (Ph.D. Harvard, Social Anthropology, 2002) is the author of She's Mad Real: Popular Culture and West Indian Girls in Brooklyn, and editor of Racial Formation in the Twenty-First Century. Her recent article, “‘Beyoncé and Her Husband’: Infidelity and Kinship in a Black Marriage," appears in a special issue of differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies. Her current projects include one manuscript that situates Guyana’s marginality in scholarly discourses against its centrality in global, gendered racializations; and another that examines genre-defying Black women artists. Previously, LaBennett was Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies for Cornell University’s Africana Studies and Research Center.

Shawn McDaniel (Ph.D. The Graduate Center, CUNY) is Assistant Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity. Prior to joining USC, he was Assistant Professor of Romance Studies and Latina/o Studies and the Emerson-Krapels Faculty Fellow at Cornell University. Intersecting Caribbean, Latin American, and Latinx literary and cultural studies, his research and pedagogy explore subjectivity, power, aesthetics, modernism, race, gender, sexuality, and dissidence in print, visual, and sonic cultures of the Americas from the nineteenth century to the present. He is working on two book projects: Centenary Subjects: Race, Reason, and Rupture in the Americas and Cuban Chic: Queer Deco and Diasporic Modernism in New York and Havana.

Natalia Molina’s work lies at the intersections of race, gender, culture, and citizenship. She is the author of two award-winning books, Fit to be Citizens? Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879–1939 and How Race Is Made in America: Immigration, Citizenship, and the Historical Power of Racial Scripts. Her current book project examines eight decades of place-making, community formation, and gentrification in the historically multiethnic Los Angeles community of Echo Park.