Visit by Professor Paola Bacchetta, April 4, 2022

Paola Bacchetta is Professor in the Department of Gender and Women's Studies at University of California, Berkeley. She was the first Chair of the Gender Consortium at Berkeley, which represents all research centers and teaching units on gender across the university. Her books include: Co-Motion: On Feminist and Queer Solidarities (Forthcoming Duke); Fatima Mernissi For Our Times, c-edited with Minoo Moallem (Forthcoming Syracuse); Global Raciality: Empire, Postcoloniality, and Decoloniality, co-edited with Sunaina Maira and Howard Winant (New York: Routledge, 2019); Femminismi Queer Postcoloniali: critiche transnazionali all’omofobia, all’islamofobia e all’omonazionalismo (Queer Postcolonial Feminisms: Transnational Critiques of Homophobia, Islamophobia and Homonationalism, co-edited with Laura Fantone. Verona, Italy: Ombre Corte, 2015); Gender in the Hindu Nation (sole author; India: Women Ink, 2004); Right-Wing Women: From Conservatives to Extremists around the World (New York: Routledge; with Margaret Power, 2002); Textes du Mouvement Lesbien en France, 1970-2000 (Texts from the French Lesbian Movement, 1970-2000; On DVD; with Claudie Lesselier, 2011). See: https://berkeley.academia.edu/PaolaBacchetta

Visit by Professor Elana Resnick, April 11, 2022

Elana Resnick is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Her research interests include racism and racialization, waste, materiality, critical environmental politics, labor, linguistic anthropology, nuclear energy, infrastructural inequalities, activism, and humor. Based on over three consecutive years of fieldwork in Bulgaria conducted on city streets, in landfills, Romani neighborhoods, executive offices, and at the Ministry of the Environment, her book manuscript examines the juncture of material waste management and racialization, specifically highlighting how environmental sustainability becomes racial practice. She is the founder/director of the Infrastructural Inequalities Research Group Lab.

Visit by Professor Nicholas De Genova, April 18, 2022

Nicholas De Genova  is Professor and Chair of the Department of Comparative Cultural Studies at the University of Houston. His research centers primarily on migration, borders, citizenship, and race. De Genova is the author of Working the Boundaries: Race, Space, and "Illegality" in Mexican Chicago (Duke University Press, 2005); co-author of  Latino Crossings: Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and the Politics of Race and Citizenship (with Ana Y. Ramos-Zayas; Routledge, 2003); editor of  Racial Transformations: Latinos and Asians Remaking the United States (Duke University Press, 2006); co-editor of The Deportation Regime: Sovereignty, Space, and the Freedom of Movement (with Nathalie Peutz; Duke University Press, 2010); editor of The Borders of "Europe": Autonomy of Migration, Tactics of Bordering (Duke University Press, 2017); co-editor of  Roma Migrants in the European Union: Un/Free Mobility (with Can Yildiz; Routledge, 2019 ).

Visit by Professor Anna Korteweg, April 25, 2022

Anna C. Korteweg is Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto (PhD, Sociology, University of California Berkeley, 2004). Her research focuses on the ways in which the perceived problems of immigrant integration are constructed in the intersections of gender, religion, ethnicity, and national origin. From this critical vantage point, she has published extensively on debates surrounding the wearing of the headscarf, so-called “honour-based” violence, and Sharia law. Her current projects look at the return of women who joined IS to their European home countries, the co-construction of borders and subjectivity in LGBTQ+ refugee politics, and the citizenship implications of refugee sponsorship in Canada. Professor Korteweg also focuses on creative avenues for communicating ideas, including digital storytelling and podcasting. Professor Korteweg has published the two monographs: The Headscarf Debates: Conflicts of National Belonging (Stanford University Press 2014, with Gökçe Yurdakul); Debating Sharia: Islam, Gender Politics, and Family Law Arbitration (edited with Jennifer Selby, University of Toronto Press 2012).

Visit by Professor Stephanie Malia Hom, May 16, 2022

Stephanie Malia Hom is Assistant Professor of French and Italian at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She writes and lectures on modern Italy and the Mediterranean, mobility studies, colonialism and imperialism, migration and detention, and tourism history and practice. She is the author of Empire's Mobius Strip: Historical Echoes in Italy's Crisis of Migration and Detention (Cornell, 2019) and The Beautiful Country: Tourism and the Impossible State of Destination Italy (Toronto, 2015). She also co-edited with Ruth Ben-Ghiat Italian Mobilities (Routledge, 2016). Her essays and articles have been published in a wide range of venues, including the leading journals in the fields of Italian studies, tourism history, urban studies, and folklore. She has also worked as a journalist in the U.S. and Europe.

Visit by Professor Nimisha Barton, May 23, 2022

Nimisha Barton is a Visiting Scholar at UC Irvine and an Equity Consultant in education who develops and implements anti-racist programs, trainings, and curricula for students, faculty, and administrators. Her award-winning research on gender, sexuality, and immigration in modern France has appeared in French Politics, Culture and Society, Journal of Women's History, and various edited volumes. Her co-edited volume on women, gender, and citizenship in modern France appeared in 2018 with the University of Nebraska Press. Her book, entitled Reproductive Citizens: Gender, Immigration, and the State in France, 1880-1945, appeared in 2020 with Cornell University Press. It recently won Honorable Mention for the Society of French Historical Studies’ David H. Pinkney Prize which recognizes the most distinguished book in French history. It also was awarded the prestigious J. Russell Major prize offered by the American Historical Association for best Anglophone book in French history.

Visit by Professor Todd Henry, January 19, 2022

Todd A. Henry (Ph.D., UCLA, 2006; Associate Professor, UCSD, 2009-Present) is a specialist of modern Korea with a focus on the period of Japanese rule and its postcolonial afterlives. A social and cultural historian interested in global forces that (re)produce lived spaces, he also studies cross-border processes linking South Korea, North Korea, Japan, and the US in the creation of “Hot War” militarisms, the transpacific practice of medical sciences, and the embodied experiences of hetero-patriarchal capitalism. Dr. Henry’s first book, Assimilating Seoul (University of California Press, 2014; Korean translation, 2020), which won a 2020 Sejong Book Prize in History, Geography, and Tourism, addressed the violent but contested role of public spaces in colonial Korea. He has written several related articles on questions of place, race, and nation in colonizing and decolonizing movements on the peninsula (see "publications" tab for details). Currently, Dr. Henry is at work on two books (volume 1: 1950-1980; and volume 2: 1980-1995) and a co-produced documentary that center understudied, "queer" dimensions of authoritarian development in Cold War South Korea.

Visit by Professor Kori Graves, February 3, 2022

Dr. Kori A. Graves is an Associate Professor of History at the University at Albany, SUNY. A graduate of the Program in Gender and Women’s History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Professor Graves teaches courses that explore gender and women’s history, the history of marriage and family, and histories of the body, beauty and identity politics in the U.S. Her book, A War Born Family: African American Adoption in the Wake of the Korean War tells the story of the first African Americans who adopted Korean children, and the ways their efforts revealed the contested nature of adoptive family formation across racial and national color lines. Her research and teaching interests explore the significance of political and popular representations of race, nation, and family – with a specific emphasis on the histories of motherhood and transracial adoption. Dr. Graves is also committed to efforts that support the recruitment and retention of students who are members of historically underrepresented populations, first generation students, and students with special needs.

Visit by Professor Jennifer Chun, March 2, 2022

Jennifer Jihye Chun is Associate Professor in the Asian American Studies Department and the International Institute at UCLA. She was previously on the faculty at the University of Toronto (2012-18) and the University of British Columbia (2006-12). Her research explores the interconnected worlds of gender, race, ethnicity, migration and labor through a comparative and critical ethnographic lens. She is the author of the award-winning book, Organizing at the Margins: The Symbolic Politics of Labor in South Korea and the United States (Cornell University Press, 2009) as well as numerous journal articles and book chapters on informal and precarious worker organizing; Asian immigrant women and community organizing; gender, migration, and care work; and global labor movements. Currently, she is writing a book monograph on protest cultures in South Korea with Ju Hui Judy Han.

Visit by Professor Lynn Hudson October 7, 2021

Lynn Hudson's areas of specialization include African American history, women and gender history, the history of the U.S. West, public history, and history and memory studies. She is the author of The Making of ‘Mammy Pleasant’: A Black Entrepreneur in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003), which was awarded the Barbara Penny Kanner Prize from the Western Association of Women Historians. Her book, West of Jim Crow: The Fight Against California's Color Line (University of Illinois Press, September 2020) documents the ways California was an innovator of methods to control, contain, and restrict African Americans. One of the primary goals of the research is to understand how the state could simultaneously be a haven from and an arbiter of discrimination. Additionally, it charts the myriad practices that African Americans and their allies employed to survive and resist segregation. Hudson has taught graduate and undergraduate courses in the histories of race and gender in the U.S. at several institutions including the University of California, San Diego, and California Polytechnic State University at San Luis Obispo. Before teaching at UIC she was chair of the history department at Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota.

Visit by Prof. Manuel Pastor November 4, 2021

Visit by Professors Valerie Matsumoto & Devon Tsuno October 14, 2021

Valerie Matsumoto is a professor & George and Sakaye Aratani Chair on the Japanese American Incarceration, Redress and Community in the Department of History and the Department of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. In addition to her book City Girls: The Nisei Social World in Los Angeles, 1920-1950, she is the author of Farming the Home Place: A Japanese American Community in California, 1919-1982 and co-edited the essay collection Over the Edge: Remapping the American West. She has received the Toshio and Doris Hoshide Distinguished Teaching Award, the UCLA Distinguished Teaching Award, and the Award for Excellence in Graduate Mentoring and Teaching from the UCLA Asian American Studies Graduate Student Association. In July 2017 she was appointed to the George and Sakaye Aratani Endowed Chair on the Japanese American Incarceration, Redress, and Community.

Devon Tsuno is Los Angeles-native. His recent body of abstract paintings on handmade papers focuses on the LA landscape’s bodies of water and native versus non-native vegetation. Utilizing risograph printing, his print projects include artist books and site-specific installations. Tsuno and has exhibited internationally in Japan, Mexico, Korea, The Netherlands, Hong Kong, and New Zealand. He was awarded a 2014 CCF Emerging Artist Fellowship for Visual Art. Since 2003, Devon has worked as the founder/ director of Concrete Walls, an artist-run curatorial project that focuses on building community by facilitating collaborations, educational projects, and group exhibitions throughout Southern California. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Art and Design at California State University, Dominguez Hills.

Manuel Pastor is Distinguished Professor of Sociology and American Studies & Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. Pastor holds an economics Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, is the inaugural holder of the Turpanjian Chair in Civil Society and Social Change, and he currently directs the Equity Research Institute (ERI). Dr. Pastor’s research has generally focused on issues of the economic, environmental and social conditions facing low-income urban communities – and the social movements seeking to change those realities. His work culminates in his recent book, State of Resistance: What California's Dizzying Descent and Remarkable Resurgence Means for America's Future (New Press 2018). Previous volumes include Equity, Growth, and Community: What the Nation Can Learn from America's Metro Areas, co-authored with Chris Benner (UC Press 2015), a text that argues how inequality stunts economic growth and how bringing together equity and growth requires concerted local action. He also co-edited the book, Unsettled Americans: Metropolitan Context and Civic Leadership for Immigrant Integration with John Mollenkopf (Cornell University Press 2016), which offers a comparative study and detailed analyses of immigrant incorporation efforts across seven different U.S. metro regions.

Visit by Professor Kara Keeling November 18, 2021

Kara Keeling is a Professor in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago. Keeling’s research has focused on African American film, representations of race, sexuality, and gender in cinema, critical theory, and cultural studies. Keeling’s most recent monograph, Queer Times, Black Futures, was published in 2019 by New York University Press. It considers the promises and pitfalls of imagination, technology, futurity, and liberation as they have persisted in and through racial capitalism by exploring how the speculative fictions of cinema, music, and literature that center black existence provide scenarios wherein we might imagine alternative worlds, queer and otherwise. Keeling’s first book, The Witch's Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense (Duke University Press, 2007), explores the role of cinematic images in the construction and maintenance of hegemonic conceptions of the world and interrogates the complex relationships between cinematic visibility, minority politics, and the labor required to create and maintain alternative organizations of social life. Keeling is co-editor (with Josh Kun) of Sound Clash: Listening to American Studies, a collection of writings about sound and American Studies and (with Colin MacCabe and Cornel West) of a selection of writings by the late James A. Snead entitled European Pedigrees/ African Contagions: Racist Traces and Other Writing.