Participants in the Research Group Directors
Françoise Lionnet (Ph.D. Michigan; 1986. Professor and Chair of French and Francophone Studies, UCLA) is a comparatist specializing in 19th and 20th century French, Francophone and American literatures, especially the cultural traditions of the African diasporas, colonial and postcolonial literatures, and narratives by women. She is the author of Autobiographical Voices: Race, Gender, Self-Portraiture (Cornell 1989) and Postcolonial Representations: Women, Literature, Identity (Cornell 1995). She has edited an issue of L'Esprit Créateur on "Cities, Modernity, and Cultural Memory" (2001), and co-edited special issues of Signs (1995) and Yale French Studies (1993). Her first book is a ground breaking and influential comparative study of European, Francophone Caribbean, and African American writers, and she has continued to do work in the general area of comparative minority discourse. A non-UC member of UCHRI in 1991-92, she benefited from the input of fellows in the writing of her second book. She has directed an NEH institute in 1995 on "French Cultural Studies: Identities, Communities, and Cultural Practices," and her current work-in-progress, Dissonant Echoes, is on the re-appropriation of British and American literary texts by Francophone Caribbean and Indian Ocean writers. She was the Pearce Miller Research Professor in literature at Northwestern University before moving to UCLA in 1998 to chair the department of French, now the Department of French and Francophone Studies. She is currently editing special issues of Signs and MLN. Shu-mei Shih (Ph. D. UCLA, 1992; Associate Professor of Comparative Literature, East Asian Languages and Cultures, and Asian American Studies; Director, Comparative and Interdisciplinary Research on Asia in the UCLA International Institute) is a comparatist by training and has worked both within area studies (literature and cinema from China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong) and ethnic studies (Asian American literature). She was one of the first scholars in the nation to bridge these two disciplines. Her book The Lure of the Modern: Writing Modernism in Semicolonial China (California, 2001), views Chinese modernism in a comparative light vis-a-vis Euro-American modernisms and situates it within China's semicolonial cultural politics. Her book-in-progress, Visuality and Identity: Cultural Transactions across the Chinese Pacific (under contract with the University of California Press), links Chinese cultural practices in China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong with those in the Chinese diaspora in the United States. She is a two-time resident research fellow at UCHRI ("Colonialism and Modernity in East Asia," 1994; "Feminist Crossings," 1999) and a recipient of various awards (American Council of Learned Societies, Fulbright-Hays, Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation, etc.). She writes in English and Chinese, and publishes in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan and China, as well as the United States.
Lindon Barrett (Ph.D. U of Pennsylvania, 1990; Professor of English and Comparative Literature, UCI) specializes in African American literature and culture and critical theory. He directed the UCI Critical Theory Institute/Intersegmental Summer program in 1997. His books include Blackness and Value: Seeing Double (Cambridge, 1999) and a manuscript volume of essays entitled Blackness and the Mind/Body Split (forthcoming). He served as Assoc. Editor (literary and cultural criticism) of the journal Callaloo from 1997-2000. He has participated in international conferences in Australia, Austria, Bangkok, Canada, China, Finland, France, Netherlands, and Switzerland, and brings a global cultural and philosophical perspective to our group. Ali Behdad (Ph.D. U. of Michigan, 1990; Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature, UCLA) is the author of Belated Travelers: Orientalism in the Age of Colonial Dissolution (Duke, 1994). He specializes in 19th and 20 th century French and British literature, postcolonial theory, nationalism and immigration. He has written widely on the literature of Empire and on 19th century Orientalist photography in the Middle East. His forthcoming book, Forgetful Nation: Reflections on Immigration and Cultural Identity in the United States, offers a critical study of the relation between immigration as a cultural and political phenomenon and nationalism. Michael Bourdaghs (Ph.D., Cornell 1996; Assistant Professor of East Asian Languages & Cultures, UCLA). His current research interests include modern constructions of the body, popular culture, and the impact of globalization on national and other identities. He is the editor of the translation of Kamei Hideo's Transformations of Sensibility: The Phenomenology of Meiji Literature (forthcoming from University of Michigan Center for Japanese Studies Publications) and the author of The Dawn that Never Comes: Shimazaki Tôson and Japanese Nationalism (forthcoming from Columbia University Press). Karl Britto (Ph.D. Yale 1998; Assistant Professor of French and Comparative Literature, UCB) is currently working on two book projects: Disorientation: Interculturality and Identity in Vietnamese Francophone Literature (which grew out of his dissertation) and Bodies in Motion: Immigration and Identity in Contemporary Literature. He does innovative work in a "cutting edge" area of Francophone studies (South East Asia), and his second project brings comparative and transnational issues to bear on gender studies. Liz Constable (Ph.D. UC Irvine 1995; Assistant Professor of French, UCD) specializes in modernity and modernism, and has published work on the cultural politics of decadence and the fin-de-siecle, women writers and decadence, the intersections of aesthetics and politics in late nineteenth-century nationalisms, the cultural history of patterns of consumption in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and nineteenth and twentieth century feminisms. Co-editor of a collection of interdisciplinary essays on decadence, Perennial Decay: On the Aesthetics and Politics of Decadence, she is currently working on a related book-length project on the colonial genealogies of decadent narrative entitled Orienting Desire: Masters, Slaves and Mistresses of Mediation in Decadent Narrative. She is particularly interested in contemporary critical theory, feminist theories and praxes, film studies, the literatures and cultures of Quebec, and the intellectual and cultural histories of decolonization. In this last area of research specialization, she has edited a collection of essays on States of Shame, focusing on the cultural and psychic roles of emotions. Neil Larsen (Ph.D. Minnesota, 1983; Professor of Latin American and Comparative Literature and of Critical Theory, UCD) is the author of Modernism and Hegemony (Minnesota 1990), Reading North by South (Minnesota 1995), and Determinations: Theory, Nation and Narrative in the Americas (Verso, 2001). He co-directs the program in Critical Theory at UC Davis. His extensive written work comprises 19th century and contemporary Latin American narrative; postcolonial studies; and critical theory, especially in the Marxist tradition. Seiji Mizuta Lippit (Ph.D. Columbia; 1997; Assistant Professor of East Asian Languages & Cultures, UCLA) specializes in modern Japanese literature and culture and has worked on issues related to modernism, subjectivity, and minority literature. He is the editor of The Essential Akutagawa (Marsilio, 1999) and the author of Topographies of Japanese Modernism (Columbia, 2002). Elizabeth Marchant (Ph.D. NYU 1995; Associate Professor of Spanish and Portuguese, UCLA) is the author of Critical Acts: Latin American Women and Cultural Criticism (UP of Florida, 1999). The book examines the cultural criticism produced by Lucia Miguel Pereira (Brazil), Victoria Ocampo (Argentina) and Gabriela Mistral (Chile), paying special attention to the critical strategies and generic disruptions these intellectuals employ in relation to race, gender and national identity. She was a member of the faculty research seminar on "The Culture of the Americas and the Narratives of Globalization" at UCHRI in 1998. She is currently at work on a book titled Brazil and the Black Atlantic: Afro-Brazilian Cultural Expression and the Politics of Identity. Kathleen McHugh (Ph.D. Indiana, 1991; Associate Professor of English, UCLA) is the author of American Domesticity: From How-To Manual to Hollywood Melodrama (Oxford, 1999). Her co-edited volume Gender, Genre, and National Cinema: South Korean Golden Age Melodrama, which focuses on postcolonial South Korean cinema and its relationship to other Pacific Rim cinemas, especially that of Hollywood, is currently under review for publication. She is now working on a single authored book on transnational filmic autobiographies as well as editing a collection of essays on collaborative life-narratives in the Americas. Rafael Pérez-Torres (Ph.D. Stanford 1989; Associate Professor of English, UCLA) specializes in comparative studies of contemporary U.S. culture. His work examines culture in relation to social configurations of race, ethnicity, gender and sexuality. In addition to his book Movements in Chicano Poetry: Against Myths, Against Margins (Cambridge University Press, 1995), he is co-editor of The Chicano Studies Reader: An Anthology of Aztlán 1970-2000 (Chicano Studies Research Center Publications, 2001). His other most recent publications include "Mestizaje in the Mix: Chicano Identity, Politics, and Postmodern Music" in Music and the Racial Imagination edited by Ronald Radano and Philip Bohlman (University of Chicago Press, 2000), "Ethnicity, Ethics and Latino Aesthetics" (American Literary History, 12.3), and "Whither Aztlán? Considering a Millennial Chicano Studies" (Genre 32). Before arriving at UCLA, he held positions at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the University of Pennsylvania, and UC Santa Barbara. Jenny Sharpe (Ph.D. U of Texas, 1987; Professor of English and Comparative Literature, UCLA). She is author of Allegories of Empire: The Figure of Woman in the Colonial Text (Minnesota 1993), which analyzes how problems of imperialism are staged in narratives of sexual violence, and Ghosts of Slavery: A Literary Archeology of Black Women's Lives (Minnesota 2003), which challenges a paradigm that equates agency with resistance and self-determination, and introduces new ways to examine women's negotiations for power within the constraints of slavery. She is currently working on "Relocating the Postcolony in an Age of Globalization," a study that engages current debates on globalization and transnationalism with the objective of placing the rural/urban dynamics of nations within a global frame and bringing the Caribbean as a region into the conceptual framework of the Black Atlantic. Dominic Thomas (Ph.D. Yale 1996; Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies, UCLA) is a specialist of sub-Saharan African literatures and cultures. He has published Nation-Building, Propaganda, and Literature in Francophone Africa (Indiana University Press, 2002), and is completing The African Diaspora in France: Colonialism, Immigration, and Transnationalism. A recent Visiting Scholar at the Program in African Studies at Northwestern University and recipient of a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Cornell Society for the Humanities, he was the Dr. William M. Scholl Foundation Chair in Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Notre Dame before moving to UCLA. Winnie Woodhull (Ph.D. University of Wisconsin-Madison; 1979; Associate Professor of Literature, UCSD) is the author of Transfigurations of the Maghreb: Feminism, Decolonization, and Literatures (Minnesota, 1993). She has recently published such essays as "France in the Wilderness" and "Ethnicity on the French Frontier" and her work highlights the necessary crossings between French and Francophone literaures and cultures.
Moradewun Adejunmobi (Ph.D. Ibadan, 1985; Associate Professor of African American and African Studies, UCD) received her training in French studies, and has interests in African literature in French, Indian Ocean writing, and the connections between language issues, identity politics, and cultural production in West Africa. She is the author of JJ Rabearivelo, Literature and Lingua Franca in Colonial Madagascar (Peter Lang, 1996). Some of her other publications include: "English and the Audience of an African Popular Culture: The Case of Nigerian Video Film in English." (Cultural Critique 50), "Routes: Language and the Identity of African Literature" (Journal of Modern African Studies 37.4) and "Translation and Postcolonial Identity: African Writing and European Languages" (The Translator, Studies in Intercultural Communication 4.2). She is currently working on a book project exploring the forms and significance of European language in African literature and popular cultures. Anjali Arondekar (Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania, 2000; Assistant Professor of Women's Studies, UCSC) focuses on South Asian Studies, Colonial historiography, Queer Studies, Critical race Theory and nineteenth Century literary Studies. She has published variously in Journal of Asian Studies, GLQ, Symploke, Victorian Studies, Interventions, Village Voice, and Postmodern Culture and is currently working on a book-manuscript, Perverse subjects: sexuality, governance and the colonial archive. David Carroll (Ph.D. Johns Hopkins 1971; Professor and Chair of French and Italian, UCI) is the author of three books, most notably French Literary Fascism: Nationalism, Anti-Semitism, and the Ideology of Culture (Princeton, 1995), and numerous articles on contemporary philosophical, cultural, and literary issues. His interest in history, theory, race, identity, French colonialism, and Franco-American relations provides an extremely important corrective to some of the intellectual clichés that continue to exist about France in the U.S. Paula Chakravartty (Ph.D. UW-Madison, 1999; Assistant Professor of Communication, UCSD) is trained in Media Studies, Sociology and Political Economy. She is currently working on a book entitled "Leapfrogging Modernity: Labor and India's Transnational Information Economy". Her research incorporates postcolonial theory into current debates about new communications technologies, global economic integration, migration and social justice. In addition to her research on India and the Indian diaspora in the US, she is interested in comparative research on immigrant communities in the US and translocal political networks across Asia and Latin America. She has published in journals such as "Television and New Media", "Emergences", in several edited volumes and is a co-author of two public policy reports on Contingent Work in Southern California and Migrant High-Skilled Labor in the US. Anne Cheng (Associate Professor of English, UCB) Jeffrey Decker (Undergraduate Education Initiatives, Office of Honors & Undergraduate Programs, UCLA) Takashi Fujitani (Ph.D. UC Berkeley, 1986; Associate Professor of History, UCSD): Fujitani is a historican who works closely with historical documents as texts. His first book entitled Splendid Monarchy: Power and Pageantry in Modern Japan has been widely praised as the book that analyzed the mechanism of monarchic power in modern Japan most convincingly. He has since been engaged in studying Korean minorities in Japan and Japanese American minorities in the U.S. in a comparative light, as well as Japanese colonialism. He is also co-editor of Perilous Memories: The Asia Pacific War(s) (Duke, 2000) and Problems in Modernity and Japan's Emperor System (M.E. Sharpe, forthcoming). Suzanne Gearhart (Ph.D. Johns Hopkins, 1973; Professor of French, UCI) is a specialist of the Enlightenment, contemporary philosophy, and pscyhoanalysis and the author of two books, notably The Interrupted Dialectic: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Their Tragic Other (Hopkins, 1992). She has also been teaching courses on North African literature and is currently working on Maghrebian Francophone studies. Inderpal Grewal (Ph.D. UC Berkeley; Director and Professor of Women's Studies, UCI) Gil Zehava Hochberg (Ph.D. UC Berkeley; Assistant professor of Comparative Literature, UCLA) specializes in contemporary Levantine literatures (mainly North Africa, Israel, Palestine). She is especially interested in Transnational and Diaspora studies, language politics, nationalism, immigration and exile. In addition she has an MA in continental philosophy and is very interested in the relationship between modern European (French and German) philosophy and postmodern literary criticism and critical theory. She has published on such issues as: Francophone North African literature, Palestinian writers of Hebrew, Gender and nationalism, cultural memory and immigration. Her book-in-progress, The Dispossession of Authenticity: Readings in Contemporary Levantine Literature, is a comparative reading of contemporary novels written in North Africa and Israel-Palestine, introducing the Levant as a generative, transnational, multilingual, and cross-ethnic cultural horizon. Caren Kaplan ( Associate Professor of Women’s Studies, UCB) is the author of Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement (Duke UP 1996) and the co-editor with Inderpal Grewal of Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices (Minnesota UP 1994) and Introduction to Women’s Studies: Gender in a Transnational World (McGraw-Hill 2001) as well as Between Woman and Nation: Nationalisms, Transnational Feminisms, and the State (Duke UP 1999) with Norma Alarcón and Minoo Moallem. Her new work focuses on information technologies, in particular those that address location, transportation, and identity. For further information, visit http://www.geocities.com/carenkaplan03 Susan Koshy (Ph.D., English, UCLA, 1992; Associate Professor of Asian American Studies, UCSB) is an interdisciplinary scholar whose work draws on the insights of literature, anthropology, history and sociology to illuminate racial formation and the construction of gendered ethnicity in diasporic communities. Her work on diaspora is part of a larger theoretical interest in modernity, neocolonialism, and the processes of globalization and cultural transformation. Her book Desiring Orientals, Race, Sex, and the American National Imaginary is forthcoming from Stanford University Press. Her articles have appeared in the Yale Journal of Criticism, Boundary 2, Differences, Diaspora, Social Text, Journal of Asian American Studies, and in several anthologies. Her research is situated at the conjuncture of globalization theory, postcolonial studies, and ethnic studies and interrogates the boundaries of these disciplinary formations. Efrain Kristal (Ph.D. Stanford, 1985; Professor of Spanish and Portuguese and Comparative Literature, UCLA) is one of the leading scholars in Latin American literature in the US. His book, Temptation of the Word: The Novels of Mario Vargas Llosa, won the Outstanding Academic Book of the Year Award from Choice, and he is the recipient of numerous other honors and awards. Rachel Lee (Associate Professor of English and Women's Studies, UCLA), specializes in Asian American literature and performance culture. Her book, The Americas of Asian American Literature: Gendered Fictions of Nation and Transnation (Princeton University Press, 1999), addresses current debates on the relationship among Asian American ethnic identity, national belonging, globalization, and gender. Her more recent work includes an essay on women of color in relation to the institution of women's studies (Meridians, Fall 2000), and an collection of edited essays on Asian Americans and cyberspace entitled Asian America.Net (forthcoming with Routledge University Press, 2003). Lisa Lowe (Ph.D. UCSC, 1986; Professor of Literature, UCSD). Lowe's work concerns the study of colonialisms and the contradictions of postcolonial and immigrant cultures. She is the author of Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms (Cornell, 1991) and Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Duke, 1996.) She coedited with Elaine Kim, New Formations, New Questions: Asian American Studies, a special issue of positions: east asia cultures critique 5:2 (Fall 1997), and coedited with David Lloyd, The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital, an international collection of essays on culture within the political economy of globalization. Her current work, The Intimacies of Four Continents, addresses the international conditions for modern humanism and humanistic knowledge. Ghislaine Lydon (Ph.D. Michigan State Univ.; Assistant Professor of History, UCLA) Aamir R. Mufti (Ph.D. Columbia, 1998; Associate Professor of Comparative Literature, UCLA) specializes in colonial and postcolonial literatures, with a primary focus on India and Britain. His interests range over such issues as Marxism and aesthetics, genre theory, canonization, minority cultures, exile and displacement, the cultural politics of Jewish identity in Western Europe, human rights, refugees and the right to asylum, modernism and fascism, language conflicts, and the history of Anthropology. He has written on such subjects as secularism, minority culture, blasphemy and literature, the post-literate public sphere, literary criticism and social critique, and the short story in Urdu. He was for a number of years a member of the editorial collective of the journal "Social Text" and is now also affiliated with "boundary2." Harryette Mullen (Ph.D., UCSC, 1990; Associate Professor of English and African American Studies, UCLA) is a specialist in American, African American, ethnic, and women's literatures. She is also a well-known poet, and thus provides an indispensable perspective on the creative processes of minority writers. She also works on the history of slave narratives and autobiography. Leslie W. Rabine (Professor of Women's Studies and French and Director of Women and Gender Studies, UCD) is currently studying African literature and culture, is publishing The Global Circulation of African Fashion (Berg, forthcoming), and is beginning a project on the exchange of/by women in Francophone West Africa.When a specialist in nineteenth-century France, she published Reading the Romantic Heroine: Text, History, Ideology (U. of Michigan Press, 1985), Feminism, Socialism, and French Romanticism (Indiana U. Press, 1993), and Rebel Daughters: Women and the French Revolution (Oxford U. Press, 1991). Vincente L. Rafael (Ph.D. Cornell, 1984; Professor of Communication, UCSD) is the author of Contracting Colonialism: Translation and Christian Conversion in Tagalog Society Under Early Spanish Rule (Cornell, 1988, and Duke 1993), an analysis of the politics of translation and religious conversion in the Philippines during the early periods of the Spanish rule. His interest include language, translation, technology and politics in both colonial and nationalist periods. He is also interested in the problematics of area studies, particularly from the perspective of immigration and migration. He has edited Discrepant Histories: Translocal Essays on Filipino Cultures (Temple 1995), and Figures of Criminality in Indonesia, the Philippines and Colonial Vietnam (Cornell 1999). His most recent book is entitled White Love and other Events in Filipino History (Duke 2000). Currently, he is working on a book project on translation, technology and revenge at the origins of Filipino nationalism. Catherine S. Ramirez (Ph.D. UC Berkeley, 2000; Assistant Professor of American Studies, UCSC) is a Ford Foundation Post-Doctoral Fellow and Assistant Professor of American Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She graduated from the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, in May 2000 and is completing a manuscript on the participation of Mexican American women in the zoot subculture and the significance of the figures of the pachuca and pachuco in Chicano cultural production. Her research and teaching interests include Chicano literature, history, and culture; feminist theory; critical and post-colonial theory; and U.S. popular culture. She is also writing a book on science, technology, humanism, and the intersection of race, gender, and sexuality in speculative fiction by people of color. Parama Roy (Ph.D. University of Rochester; Associate Professor of English, UCR) Mark Sawyer (Ph.D. University of Chicago, 1999; Assistant Professor of Political Science, UCLA) Tyler Stovall (Ph.D. Univ. of Wisconsin-Madison, 1984; Professor of History, UCB) is the author of Paris Noir: African Americans in the City of Light (Houghton Mifflin, 1996) and The Rise of the Paris Red Belt (UC Press, 1990). He is co-editor, with Sue Peabody, of The Color of Liberty: Histories of Race in France (Duke University Press, forthcoming 2003). He is the author of numerous articles on French history and has been President of the Western Society for French History. His work on African Americans in France and on the building of an African American diasporic community in Paris is of special importance to contemporary understanding of both French and American culture. Neferti Tadiar (Ph.D. Duke, 1996; Assistant Professor of History of Consciousness, UCSC) is generally concerned with the relations between cultural production and political economy in third world and postcolonial contexts, particularly contemporary Philippines. Her published work includes articles on the feminization of labor and the crisis of Pihlippine culture, hegemonic nationalist narratives and subjective practices, and the heretical politics of Nora Aunor's superstardom. She is currently writing a book on historical experience in late Philippine modernity as articulated in feminist, urban protest and revolutionary literatures. Rob Wilson (Professor of Literature, UCSC) is a professor and graduate chair of literature at the University of California at Santa Cruz, where he relocated from the University of Hawaii at Manoa. His scholarly works include Reimagining the American Pacific, Waking In Seoul, and American Sublime and the co-edited collections Global/Local and Asia/Pacific as Space of Cultural Production. He is presently at work on a study of conversion and counter-conversion in the Pacific called Henry, Torn From the Stomach and a collection of cultural criticism for New Pacific Press called Worldings. Traise Yamamoto (Ph.D. University of Washington, 1994; Associate Professor of English, UCR) specializes in Asian American literary and cultural studies, feminist theory, autobiography studies and poetry. Her book, Masking Selves, Making Subjects: Japanese American Women, Identity, and the Body (University of California, 1999), explores Japanese American women's racialization, agency and identificatory strategies in the context of US-Japan relations and the internment. She is currently at work on a book of Asian/American feminist essays that combine autobiographical and scholarly voices, as well as a study -- Subjects of Pleasure: Disembodiment and Anhedonia in Asian America -- of the problematic of pleasure in Asian American literature and cultural production. Lisa Yoneyama (Ph.D. Stanford, 1993; Associate Professor of Literature, UCSD ) received her B.A. in German Language Studies, M.A. in International Relations, and Ph.D. in Cutural Anthropology. She teaches courses in Cultural Studies, U.S.-Japan Studies, Asian American Literature and Culture, and Critical Gender Studies, and her current research interests concern cultural dimensions of transnationalism, (neo)colonialism, and the Cold War and post-Cold War U.S. relations with Asia. Yoneyama's first book, Hiroshima Traces: Time, Space and the Dialectics of Memory (University of California, 1999) examined the memorializing of the atomic destruction of Hiroshima in various cultural products and texts. Yoneyama is also a co-editor of Perilous Memories: Politics of Remembering the Asia-Pacific War(s) (Duke University Press, 2001). She has published a number of essays in English and Japanese on multiculturalism, feminism, minority discourse, and politics of historical representations, some of which will appear in Politics of Multiculturalism: Culture, History, Cultural Studies (Iwanami Shoten, forthcoming in Japanese). Her current project, tentatively titled, Transnationalism and Its Justice, explores legal and other discourse of redress, reparations and justice concerning the twentieth century wars involving U.S. and Asia. Henry Yu (Ph.D. Princeton, 1994; Associate Professor of History, UCLA) was born and raised in Vancouver, B.C. He attended the University of British Columbia and received his B.A. in the Honours History program before receiving an M.A. and Ph.D. in History from Princeton University in 1994. He has taught since 1994 in the History Department at UCLA, and as a member of the Asian American Studies program and department at UCLA. He has also been invited to be a Visiting Professor at Yale University and the University of Pennsylvania, and has held research fellowships at Wesleyan University and the University of California Humanities Research Institute. Recently, Yu returned to his native Vancouver as an Associate Professor in the History Department at UBC with the intention of building a program focusing teaching and research on the history of Pacific migrations. Prof. Yu himself is both a second and fourth generation Canadian. His parents were first generation immigrants who came to North America from China, joining a grandfather who had spent almost his entire life in Canada. His great-grandfathers were also early Chinese pioneer in British Columbia and Australia, part of larger networks of migrants who left Zhongshan county in Guangdong province in South China and settled around the Pacific in places such as Australia, New Zealand, Hawai'i, the Caribbean, Southeast Asia, the United States, and Canada. Prof. Yu's book, Thinking Orientals: Migration, Contact, and Exoticism in Modern America (Oxford University Press, 2001) won the Norris and Carol Hundley Prize as the Most Distinguished Book of 2001 from the American Historical Association's Pacific Coast Branch, and he is currently working on a book entitled How Tiger Woods Lost His Stripes.
As statistics show, in the past decade or so, students graduating from the UC system with Ph.D. degrees in various minority discourses have had the highest level of placement success in research institutions. Students in minority discourse from departments of History, English, and Comparative Literature at UCLA alone were recently placed in such top universities as Yale, Harvard, Cornell, Columbia, University of Texas at Austin, UCLA, UCSD, and many others. Minority discourse is one of the major strengths of the UC system, where we routinely surpass Ivy League schools in terms of graduate student recruitment and job placement. We will enhance this strength by taking minority discourse to a comparative and theoretical terrain. There is tremendous interest among graduate students in comparative minority discourse. At UCLA alone, the list of graduate students who have shown interest is considerable. At other UC campuses, there is a similarly deep interest in our project. The main task of the core members of the research group in regard to graduate students will be mentorship. The core members will help mentor students along with their primary advisors through a graduate student lecture series to aid them in their publication and placement efforts. We will also hold an annual writing competition and provide a cash prize of $1,000 for the best research paper on comparative minority discourse. The winner will present the paper in a public lecture. This effort complements the various efforts of ethnic and area studies centers across the UC system as it bridges different research areas and methodologies.
Last Update: December 11, 2002 |
||||