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Ethnic Studies Events...

Fall 2009 Ethnic Studies Department Open House for Prospective Graduate Students is scheduled for Wednesday, November 4, 2009 from 9:00am-5:00pm. Prospective graduate students planning to apply for admission in Fall 2010 are encouraged to attend; it is a great opportunity to meet and talk to faculty and current students about your graduate school plans. To register for the Open House event, please email: ethnicstudiephd@ucsd.edu

In the News ...

Associate Professor Curtis Marez and Assistant Professor Kirstie Dorr will join the UCSD Ethnic Studies Department faculty in 2009-10. Prof. Marez, whose research centers on Latino/a studies, migration studies, and technology studies, received his Ph.D. in English at UC Berkeley and has been a member of the
faculties of American Studies and Ethnicity Department, Critical Studies Department, and the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California. Prof. Dorr received her Ph.D. in Comparative Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley and does research on critical race and gender studies, transnational cultural studies, and political geography; she has been a member of the faculties of the Gender and Women’s Studies Program and the Latina/Latino Studies Program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Welcome Curtis and Kirstie!

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.

Associate Professor Natalia Molina participated in a faculty exchange at the University of Bologna in Italy during April, 2009. She will be hosted by Professor Tiziano Bonazzi in the Department of Politics. The exchange program is intended to develop, strengthen, and diversify its academic linkages with the UC Education Abroad Program's partner institutions. Prof. Molina was Director of the University of California Study Center in Granada, Spain, in 2008-09.

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...

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!

Paula Marie Seniors' (Ph.D., 2003) forthcoming book, Beyond Lift Every Voice and Sing, will be released by Ohio State University Press in July 2009. One reviewer, Ula Taylor, associate professor of African American studies, UC Berkeley, writes “Utilizing a variety of primary and secondary sources, Paula Marie Seniors’s scholarship is in conversation with a number of debates, including modernity, masculinity, cultural performance, and race relations at the turn of the century. Her grounding of the work of J. Rosamond Johnson, James Weldon Johnson, and Bob Cole within the age of Booker T. Washington’s Black nationalism makes this book a must read for students and scholars in American cultural studies, drama and theatre courses, and Black studies classes that focus on the 'New Negro'.” Congratulations, Paula!

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 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 just been awarded UCLA's Institute of American Cultures/Asian American Studies Center postdoctoral fellowship for the 2009-2010 academic year. Congratulations to Monika Gosin who defended her doctoral dissertation in December of 2008.  Ms. Gosin in currently a Lecturer for UCSD Ethnic Studies Department.