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Ethnic Studies Events...

Ethnic Studies Colloquium: "The Struggle to Create a Radical Democracy in Bolivia," Nancy Postero, UCSD Department of Anthropology, Wednesday, February 10, 2010, SSB107

For more information, please check our Colloquium Calendar

In the News ...

Congratulations! to Ethnic Studies Department Undergraduate Advisor, Yolanda Escamilla, 2010 recipient of UCSD's Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action and Diversity Award. Yolanda is one of eight individual recipients to receive universitywide recognition for her dedicated efforts to improve the lives of UCSD students by making higher education more accessible to undergraduate students from all backgrounds and experiences.

American Quarterly Wins Best Special Issue Award from CELJ - American Quarterly, the official journal of the American Studies Association,received the award for Best Special Issue award from the Council of Editors of Learned Journals (CELJ) on December 28. The CELJ announced its annual winners at the Modern Language Association conference in Philadelphia. The award recognized the September 2008 issue on Nation and Migration: Past and Future (Volume 60, Number 3). The journal is published by the Johns Hopkins University Press.
Associate Professor Curtis Marez (UCSD Ethnic Studies), editor of American Quarterly, explains that “Migration is not a marginal, episodic, or temporary feature of life in the United States, but rather a central and permanent part of it—and hence a topic of ongoing interest for scholars in and around American studies.” David G. Gutiérrez from the University of California-San Diego (History) and Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo from the University of Southern California served as guest editors for the issue. “In this stunning volume, David G. Gutiérrez and Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo bring some of the finest minds across the disciplines to bear on the question of migration in all its depth and complexity. With its extraordinary combination of perspectives, the collection exudes complexly comparative yet remarkably coherent insights on the systematic linkages between globalization, transnationalism, and migration,” says Yen Le Espiritu, author of Home Bound: Filipino American Lives across Cultures, Communities, and Countries.

Professor Emerita Ana Celia Zentella is the 2009-10 Eugene M. Lang Visiting Professor for Issues of Social Change at Swarthmore College, a professorship that is offered to people who are distinguished by their engagement with social justice, civil liberites, human rights and democracy. Professor Zentella's students in her "Language, Race and Ethnic Identities in the USA" course will be working with her to write a book on multilingual Philadelphia. For more details, check The Phoenix, Swarthmore's student newspaper.

Professor Roberto Alvarez has been selected as the 2009-2010 Robert F. Kennedy Visiting Professor in Latin American Affairs at Harvard University. Dr. Alvarez begins his tenure in the fall of 2009, and will be based in the Department of Anthropology and affiliated with the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies.  Dr. Alvarez was also the recipient of the Latin American Professor of the Year award by UCSD's Center for Iberian and Latin American Studies in 2008.

Keeping Languages Alive...From voiceofsandiego.org: Friday, March 27, 2009 | Ana Celia Zentella, a recognized expert on how language shapes identity, talks about the future of Kumeyaay, raising a bilingual child, and why languages and their survival matters...To Ana Celia Zentella, you are what you speak. Zentella, a professor emerita of ethnic studies at the University of California, San Diego, has studied how languages shape our identities for decades, focusing on the role of language in Latino families. She glories in bilingual wordplay, decries "Hispanophobia" and English-only laws, and sees saving languages and the cultures that come with them as a social justice issue. For more of this story, check this URL at voiceof sandiego.org: http://www.voiceofsandiego.org/articles/2009/03/28/people/929zentella032709.txt

The Chancellor's Associates Selection Committee has chosen Professor and Ethnic Studies Department Chair, Yen Le Espiritu, as the recipient of the 2008-09 Chancellor's Associates Faculty Excellence Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching. Congratulations, Yen!
For more information about the faculty awards, please see this page: http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/newsrel/awards/03-09FacultyAwards.asp
To see a brief interview with Prof. Espiritu or with 2003 awardee, Prof. Ross Frank, check these videos:
Prof. Yen Le Espiritu Faculty Excellence Award Video (2009)
Prof. Ross Frank Faculty Excellence Award Video (2003)

In Print...

Julietta Hua (PhD, 2006) has published " 'Gucci Geishas' and Post-Feminism: Race, Gender and the Politics of Consuming the Other."  in Journal of Women Studies in Communications, Special Issue: "Power Feminisms," 32, no. 1.

This op-ed article by John D. Márquez (PhD, 2004) appears on the website theGrio: "To stop the growth of violence, understand its roots"

Myrna García's essay "Creating Home in Chicago in the 1970s: Voices of Mexican Laborers" will appear in the Anthology of Mexican and Chicano Writers in Chicago and in the Midwest, edited by María A. Beltrán-Vocal, Paul Martínez Pompa, and Irasema González. Congratulations, Myrna!

Paula Marie Seniors (PhD, 2003), Assistant Professor, Virginia Tech, will be the recipient of a 2009 Letitia Woods Brown Memorial Book Award (for junior faculty whose academic careers span10 years or less from the Association for the Study of African American Life and History) for her book, Beyond Lift Every Voice and Sing: The Culture of Uplift, Identity, and Politics in Black Musical Theater (Ohio State University Press, July 2009). The award will be presented to her by the Association of Black Women Historians. Congratulations, Paula!

Multilingual San Diego: Portraits of Language Loss and Revitalization, edited by Ethnic Studies Professor Emerita, Ana Celia Zentella, released on March 16, 2009, is a collection of articles written by UCSD's ethnic studies students. The price is $25.00 and royalties from the book will benefit Ethnic Studies Department fellowships and scholarships. You can order a copy at this link: http://www.universityreaders.com/titles/zentella/
Congratulations and thanks to everyone who contributed to this book!

Congratulations to Ethnic Studies doctoral candidate, Tere Ceseña, on the publication of a book chapter based on her MA thesis in Dancing across Borders: Danzas y Bailes Mexicanos by Olga Nájera-Ramírez, Norma E. Cantú, and Brenda M. Romero http://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/catalog/38bfz8hs9780252034091.html

Congratulations to Ethnic Studies Assistant Professor, Roshanek Kheshti, on the publication of her article, "Musical Miscegenation and the Logic of Rock and Roll: Homosocial Desire and Racial Productivity in 'A Paler Shade of White'" in the December, 2008 edition of American Quarterly.

Ethnic Studies Blog...

We welcome all thoughtful, informed and reasoned comments to our departmental statements. Please post your comments on our blog (the views expressed herein do not necessarily represent the views of all faculty and graduate students at the Department of Ethnic Studies, the Regents of the University of California, or the University of California, San Diego): http://ethnicstudiesucsd.wordpress.com/

Graduate Student Notes...

Congratulations! to Maile Arvin, who has been awarded a three year Ford Foundation Pre-Doctoral Diversity Fellowship; Ms. Arvin recently successfully defended her M.A. thesis, "Sovereignty Will Not Be Funded: Indigenous Citizenship in Hawai‘i’s Non-Profit Industrial Complex"; to Rebecca Kinney, who has been awarded the 2009-10 Fletcher Jones Dissertation Year Fellowship; to Cathi Kozen, who has been awarded a University of California Human Rights Fellowship and a research grant from the UC Humanities Research Institute to support her research on the Japanese Latin American Redress Movement; to Ayako Sahara, who has been awarded a Gerald R. Ford Foundation Research Travel Grant and the Joseph Naiman Fellowship in Japanese Studies to support her research on the politics of U.S. efforts to resettle Southeast Asian refugees immediately after the "Fall of Saigon" in 1975; to Lila Sharif who has been selected by the UCSD Friends of the International Center to receive a Friends of the International Center Scholarship to support her research on the Palestinian diaspora; to Ma Vang who has been awarded an Oceanids Memorial Fellowship, which will support her research on Hmong refugees and was selected as the 1st recipient of the UCI Southeast Asian Archive Anne Frank Visiting Researcher Award; and to Traci Brynne Voyles, recipient of the 2009 Academic Senate, Barbara and Paul Saltman Graduate Student Excellent Teaching Award. Ms. Voyles was honored at a campus celebration Friday, May 29, 2009; she is one of two UCSD graduate students honored at the ceremony recognizing excellent teaching by UCSD faculty, lecturers and graduate students, of which more details are available at:
http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/newsrel/events/05-09TeachingAwards.asp

Alumni Notes...

Congratulations to Ralina Joseph (PhD 2005), currently an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Washington, who has received two fellowships: a Ford Postdoctoral Fellowship and a Woodrow Wilson Career Enhancement fellowship; she will be completing research on African American women’s resistance to “post-identity" for the next year and a half. Congratulations to Monika Gosin who has been selected as the Postdoctoral Associate for the Program in Latino/a Studies in the Global South at Duke University starting August 15, 2009; Dr. Gosin received her Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies in Spring 2009. Congratulations to Denise Khor, who has been invited to serve as Lecturer in the Department of History at Harvard University for the 2009-2010 academic year; she will offer courses in Asian American history and histories of race, ethnicity, and immigration. Congratulations to Thuy Vo Dong, who has been awarded UCLA's Institute of American Cultures/Asian American Studies Center postdoctoral fellowship for the 2009-2010 academic year.