UCLA Graduate Division

Administrative Officers, Deans, Department Chairs, Directors, Vice Chancellors and Asian American Studies Faculty

Dear Colleagues:

It is with mixed emotions that I inform you that after more than 18 years of distinguished leadership of the Asian American Studies Center (AASC), Professor Don T. Nakanishi will conclude his service as director, effective July 1, 2009.  After a 35-year career at UCLA, Don will retire in September 2009 to begin work for the advancement of East Los Angeles, where he was born and raised, while continuing to write and to be engaged in political and educational issues.

I want to personally thank Don for his outstanding leadership of the AASC, which is widely acknowledged to be the nation‚s premier research center in the field of Asian American Studies.  During Don‚s tenure as director, the AASC has become an established leader in scholarship, public policy, academic programs, archival development, community-campus partnerships and publications.  The AASC Press publishes Amerasia Journal, the leading scholarly journal in Asian American Studies, which Don co-founded as a Yale undergraduate in 1970, the policy journal AAPI Nexus, and other books and pamphlets.  Don has been the driving force behind these remarkable achievements for almost two decades.  His collegial and consultative leadership style is highly praised by his colleagues and his personal attributes of compassion, dignity and integrity are prized by all who know him.

Don assumed the directorship of the AASC in 1990 and holds faculty appointments in the Department of Education and the Department of Asian American Studies.  He is a world renowned authority on Asian American politics whose expertise is sought by mainstream journalists as well as fellow scholars.  During his stewardship of the Center, the number of campus specialists in Asian American Studies has grown significantly, from six professors to over forty in 25 departments including the newly established Department of Asian American Studies.  Don has also been instrumental in the growth of the Center‚s endowment which now exceeds $6 million, and includes three endowed chairs, research funds, graduate fellowships, undergraduate scholarships, and academic prizes.

Don has been extraordinarily effective in building bridges from UCLA to the surrounding community and to national organizations and groups.  During his tenure as Director, AASC collaborated with Leadership Education for Asian Pacifics to develop the Asian Pacific American Public Policy Program, the nation‚s first think tank on Asian American issues.  He is a founder of Asian Pacific Americans in Higher Education, served as president of the Association of Asian American Studies, and chaired the Asian American Politics Caucus of the American Political Science Association.  Don has also played an active role in developing Southern California‚s infrastructure of social service agencies, civil rights organizations, museums, historical societies, media and cultural groups, and business associations that serve and represent the Asian American and Pacific Islander population.

A. Magazine identified Don as one of the 100 Most Influential Asian Americans in the United States during the decade of the 1990s and the Smithsonian Institution appointed him to a 25-member national Blue Ribbon Commission to plan for the future of the Smithsonian during the 21st century.  President Bill Clinton appointed him to the Civil Liberties Public Education Fund Board of Directors, which administered the nation-wide public education and research program that was established under the 1988 Civil Liberties Act that provided a national apology and reparations for the 120,000 Japanese Americans who were incarcerated in concentration camps during World War II.  In 2004, he received the Academic Senate‚s Fair and Open Academic Environment Award.  In November 2008, he will receive the prestigious Yale Medal from his alma mater.

As we continue our work with Don throughout the upcoming academic year, please join me in thanking him for his outstanding leadership and commitment to UCLA.  As one of his colleagues recently noted, Don has been a high impact leader who combines a powerful and clear vision with an extraordinary ability to bring out the best in others.  We are truly privileged to have been the beneficiaries of his leadership and his exceptional dedication.

Professor Paul M. Ong, of Asian American Studies and the School of Public Affairs, will chair the search committee for a new director.

Sincerely,

Claudia Mitchell-Kernan
Vice Chancellor Graduate Studies
Dean Graduate Division

The AAAS May 2008 newsletter is now out. We have sent the newsletter through email to members who have listed their email addresses on their membership forms. The newsletter is also available on our website: http://aaastudies.org/newsletters/index.html

AAAS BOOK AWARDS
Call for nominations

The Association for Asian American Studies (AAAS) is currently accepting nominations for the AAAS Annual Book Awards. The Association offers awards for titles of merit published in 2007. Categories include: Social Science, Literary Studies, Cultural Studies, History, Engaged Scholarship, and Poetry/Prose.  The category of Engaged Scholarship is open to various kinds of publications and is not restricted to book publications.

The Award recipients receive acknowledgement from the Association for Asian American Studies Executive Board and general membership. Award presentation will be held at our 2009 annual meeting (April 22-26, 2009 at the Hilton Waikiki Prince Kuhio Hotel in Honolulu, HI). The Committee Chair honoring the recipient with an etched plaque commemorating the author and work. Award winners will also be announced in the AAAS quarterly newsletter and on the AAAS website.

The appropriate Book Award Committee will review titles in consideration for the 2007 awards. Each Committee is selected by the Executive Board of the Association for Asian American Studies and is composed of three members who specialize in Social Science, Literary Studies, Cultural Studies, History, Engaged Scholarship, and Poetry/Prose.

Decisions from the Book Award Committees will be made in December 2008. The Secretariat will notify Award recipients and publishers by January 2009. The award will be presented to the author at the 2009 Annual Meeting of the Association for Asian American Studies in Honolulu, HI.

Books published in 2008 will be awarded at our 2010 conference (Austin, TX).

MEMBERS:
If you would like to nominate a title published in 2007, please contact Stephanie Hsu (ssh13@cornell.edu) with the author and book title no later than June 30, 2008. It is acceptable to nominate oneself or a colleague for the award.

PUBLISHERS:
1. Complete AAAS 2007 Book Award Nomination application (http://www.aaastudies.org/book/index.html)

2. Ship five (5) copies of the nominated title, along with your specification for title category, to the address below:

AAAS Book Awards
Secretariat
Association for Asian American Studies
420 Rockefeller Hall
Ithaca, NY 14853-2502

Your completed application and copies of the work must be post-marked no later than June 30, 2008 in order to be considered for the 2007 AAAS Book Award.

Call For Papers: our FEB 12-14 ‘009 conference

SASA 2009 /// BEGINNINGS AND RENEWALS: LOCATING AMERICAN STUDIES

Southern American Studies Association’s NEXT biennial meeting

George Mason University / Fairfax, Virginia / February 12-14, 2009

The 2009 biennial meeting of the Southern American Studies Association will be held on the campus of George Mason University in the heart of northern Virginia, a longstanding yet ever-changing site of transatlantic, multi-ethnic, colonial, urban, and cosmopolitan American beginnings and renewals. About fifteen miles from downtown Washington,DC, and within a few miles of Arlington, Mount Vernon, the Pentagon, Old Town Alexandria, and much more, northern Virginia is a place where the“old” and the “new” continue to meet and reinvent each other.

The Washington, DC, metropolitan area is famous for its many iconic,monumental fashionings of U.S. national identity and cultural memory. But this is of course also a region of tremendous fluidity, a place full of surprises and crisscrossed by routes—of trade, labor, government,law, media, languages, cultures—that continue to be negotiated,constructed, mapped, traveled, toured, enforced, and contested. SASA2009 offers us an opportunity to consider how these and other networks provoke both connections and disconnections among the local, the federal, the regional, the national, the hemispheric, and the global. We’ll also investigate how routes and roots help us understand beginnings and renewals and help us undertake the work of locating American studies in place, space, and time.

We invite our colleagues in American Studies, Southern Studies, and all related fields of study and areas of interest to join us as we investigate these and other ways of locating American Studies. While we welcome proposals addressing the conference theme and are always happy to consider proposals investigating the South, broadly defined, this conference is open to anyone interested in contributing to the interdisciplinary study of American cultures.

Visit us on the web at sasa.gmu.edu (soon!) and, of course, here theasa.net.

Please send 2-3-page session proposals and/or one-page individual paper abstracts, as MS Word attachments, to Eric Gary Anderson at George Mason University: eandersd@gmu.edu. The deadline for proposals is October15, 2008.

Conference attendees may be listed in the conference program as participants in a maximum of two sessions. While we welcome a range of panel formats, we ask that panels be designed so that they fit within a75-minute time frame with at least 15 minutes dedicated to discussion.

As ever, we especially encourage graduate students to attend and present papers. Our CRITOPH PRIZE, honoring the best graduate student paper presented at each biennial conference, includes a framed, certificate, a $250 check, and recognition at the next SASA meeting.

Possible topics for session and individual paper proposals include butare not limited to:

• American Indian roots and routes
• Colonial and/or other “beginnings”
• Urban and/or other “renewals”
• New iterations of American Studies
• Formations and deformations of American communities/neighborhoods
• Growth, sprawl, development, reclamation: cities, suburbs, exurbs,industries
• Waterways and waterfronts; ports and maritime culture
• Transatlantic / colonial encounters on the Eastern seaboard
• Early African American history and culture
• Geographics and natural history
• Representing and contesting slavery
• Travel and tourism, domestic and international, then and now
• Contested representations of American Indians
• Public cultures

• Forms of material culture
• Ethnic and multiethnic beginninSecrets, disguises, covert identities Museums and/or monuments
• Animals / Animal Rights
• Music and musicology
• Ethnic enclaves in the South, the mid-Atlantic, and/or the U.S.
• Film and media studies
• Cultural traumas and contested histories
• Performances, theatrical representations, festivals, public spectacles
• Photography and national memory/identity
• Politics, government, public affairs
• Literatures of beginnings and renewals
• Transatlantic or transnational literary and cultural relations
• Teaching the roots and routes of New Southern Studies
• Teaching American Studies in various contexts, settings, etc.
• Remaking Native American identities and communities
• Borderlands in the South
• Contesting notions of region and/or regionalism
• Writing / working against the slave trade
• Disrupting antebellum / postbellum or other historical / culturalparadigms
• Law and American Studies
• Locating American Studies in various institutional and other settings
• Americans / America / American Studies abroad
• Postcolonial Theory and U.S. federal law, government, foreign policy,etc.
• ASA 2008 follow-ups about “Integrative American Studies in Theory andPractice”

Again, do visit us on the web at sasa.gmu.edu (soon!)—and, of course, here within theasa.net.

Asian American Theatre Group
American Society for Theatre Research
November 5-9, 2008 Conference
Deadline Extended

Co-conveners:
Esther Kim Lee, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
(kim32@uiuc.edu)
Ron West, Metropolitan Community College, Omaha, NE
(rwest33449@aol.com)

Asian American theatre, as an investigatory category, offers a
particularly appropriate opportunity to explore the implications of
migration across and within geopolitical borders and cultural
boundaries. Though “migration” generally implies a willing movement
of people among geographic areas, it also provides a convenient
euphemism for the manipulative consequences of globalization.
Thus, “migrant” populations may be compelled or encouraged to move
among geographic regions but remain excluded from full membership
in “settled” social and political territories such as the Americas.
The borders are economically fluid, but culturally unyielding. In
particular, Asian populations historically have been excluded by
convention and statute from full membership in the “American”
imagination, even while they have been exploited as economic
necessities and defined as the Other. Asian American theatre
likewise struggles with the relegation to contingency status,
signaled by its persistent depiction as a component of the mid-
twentieth century’s countercultural movement, a sidebar to the main
event. Still, Asian American theatre broadly defined remains one of
the most promising sites for challenging the false dichotomy
of “Asian” and “American” that continues to define the constructed
representation of the Asian diaspora in the Americas. Our group
invites participants to address the ways in which the migration, map,
and memory of Asian American theatre unsettles “American” theatre by
re-settling the territory between the illusory poles of Asia and the
Americas. As the first ASTR session to focus on Asian American
theatre, the meeting will allow participants to explore the potential
of Asian American theatre as a web of links rather than a series of
discrete “ethnic” discourses and thereby to examine a range of
interstitial relationships that avoid isolating Asian American, yet
retain a productive distinction. In part because of our hope to draw
upon a broad community of perspectives, we especially encourage
submissions that extend Asian American beyond the American
subdivision of the United States.

Session format:

The process and implementation of the session will resemble the ASTR
seminar’s 2-hour structure. Participants must commit to submitting
preliminary drafts of their papers by August 1st and actively
participate in an online pre-conference discussion by means of a
fully secure website. The final conference drafts (8-10 pages) are
due by October 15th.

By the extended deadline of June 15, 2008, please submit an abstract
(max 500 words) and brief biography (150 words) via email to:

Esther Kim Lee, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
(kim32@uiuc.edu)

AND

Ron West, Metropolitan Community College, Omaha, NE
(rwest33449@aol.com)

AAAS 2009 Conference

Call for Papers

Challenging Inequalities:  Nations, Races and Communities

The conference theme can be interpreted in two different ways. Political, economic and social inequalities among nations, races, and other communities are indeed challenging insofar as they have persisted to the present and continue to resist reduction. At the same time, the theme can also be understood as a call for scholars, students and community activists to develop ways to challenge inequalities in order to foster equality, justice and fairness among nations, races, and communities of various backgrounds, including ethnicity, gender, class, sexual orientation, and nationality.

Honolulu, and more generally Hawai‘i, provides an appropriate site for the Association for Asian American Studies annual conference because 2009 marks the fiftieth anniversary of statehood for Hawai‘i. The islands became a state in 1959 because of the unequal power relations between the nations of Hawai‘i and the United States that resulted in the overthrow of the Hawaiian kingdom in 1893 and its annexation as a U.S. territory in 1898. The fiftieth anniversary of statehood is not likely to be officially celebrated in Hawai‘i out of respect for the concerns of the Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) people who became U.S. colonial subjects after annexation. By contrast, some Asian American groups, such as Chinese Americans and Japanese Americans, have benefited substantially from statehood as evident from their dominant economic and political status in Hawai‘i. Our conference can serve as a forum to rethink the causes and differential consequences of the emerging American Empire in the Pacific and Asia in the late nineteenth century and its peremptory status in the affairs of Asian Americans and of Asian and Pacific Island peoples in the twentieth century, and to consider its possible decline in the current neoliberal age.

The historical injustices and violence of U.S. colonization of Hawai‘i and the contemporary marginalization of Kanaka Maoli in their homeland provide a political, economic and cultural context for rethinking other challenging inequalities that continue to plague us and compel us to develop appropriate means to contest them. Such inequalities, albeit constantly shifting, include those between the United States and Asian and Pacific nations, especially as a result of the economic, cultural and military globalization of the latter nations, including Hawai‘i, under the impetus of transnational capital. In response, nationalist movements, including the Hawaiian sovereignty movement, have emerged to resist such globalizing processes. What role can Asian Americanists play in our teaching, research, and community service in rethinking and challenging such global inequalities among nations and their peoples?

Inequalities among races include those between Asian Americans and other racial groups, including Pacific Islanders. In what is being referred to as his “A More Perfect Union” speech on March 18, 2008, Honolulu-born and raised Barack Obama described contemporary race relations as “a racial stalemate we’ve been stuck in for years.” How then can we as academics and activists contest persisting racial inequalities and hierarchies? How do we challenge “color-blind racism” and appropriations of the civil rights struggles of the 1960s in limited ways that deny the persistence of vast racial inequalities? How can we develop collective strategies and coalitions toward a society based on tolerant and egalitarian race relations?

Inequalities among communities include those among and within Asian American groups based on ethnicity, gender, class, and sexual orientation. Women and gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender communities continue to face institutional hurdles that bar them from gaining equal treatment. Those inequalities certainly intersect with those based on nation and race (and with each other) and clearly indicate the social and cultural complexity of inequalities in society. How do such inequalities and their intersections challenge us to rethink our theoretical approaches and political strategies for resolving them?

Please join us in Honolulu in 2009 as we address the above and other significant questions and issues on challenging global, racial, ethnic, gender, class, and other inequalities. Complete panel submissions (with a minimum of three papers and a maximum of four) will be given priority, but individual paper submissions will also be considered. We invite submissions for workshops and roundtables as well.

Please note that all paper and panel applicants, including other paper presenters and discussants in a panel, must be members of the Association for Asian American Studies. If you are not an association member at the time of the submission deadline of October 31, 2008, you will have until January 1, 2009 to join by sending your payment and completed annual membership form to The John Hopkins University Press, the publisher of the association’s journal. The membership form is available on the AAAS website at http://www.aaastudies.org/forms/index.html. Note also that paper presenters and discussants must pay the conference registration fee prior to the conference in order to be included in the printed conference program.

DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSIONS: OCTOBER 31, 2008.

SHAFR Fellowship and Grant Programs
The Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations offers several grant and fellowship opportunities for graduate students who are conducting research on some aspect of U. S. foreign relations history.

Pending approval at the June 2008 Council meeting, SHAFR will inaugurate competition for eight new fellowships to cover travel and hotel expenses of up to $1,200 at the 2009 annual conference. The awards will be limited to scholars who have not previously presented at SHAFR. The criteria for the awards would be applicants who represent groups historically under-represented at SHAFR meetings and/or applicants who offer intellectual approaches that may be fruitful to SHAFR, but have been under-represented at the annual meetings. Although graduate student applicants will receive a preference, the awards will not be limited to graduate students. To further acquaint the winners with SHAFR, they will also be awarded a one-year membership with subscription to Diplomatic History and Passport.
- The Lawrence Gelfand-Armin Rappaport Fellowship ($2,000) defrays the costs of dissertation research travel.  Annual deadline for applications: November 15.

- The Stuart L. Bernath Dissertation Grant ($2,000) defrays the costs of dissertation research travel.  Annual deadline for applications: November 15.

- The Myrna F. Bernath Fellowship ($2,500) is awarded in odd years to a woman conducting research in the field.  Biannual deadline for applications: December 1 (even years).

- The Michael J. Hogan Fellowship ($2,000) defrays the costs of studying foreign languages needed for research.  Annual deadline for applications: February 1.

- The W. Stull Holt Dissertation Fellowship ($2,000) defrays the costs of travel, preferably foreign travel, necessary for dissertation research.  Annual deadline for applications: February 1.

- Samuel F. Bemis Research Grants (various amounts) are awarded to graduate students, untenured faculty, and recent Ph.D.s working as professional historians to defray costs of travel necessary to conduct research in the field.  Annual deadline for applications: February 1.
Complete information on all of SHAFR’s fellowship and grant programs may be found at http://www.shafr.org/prizes.htm.

The United States in the World/The World in the United States
2009 Conference of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations
Call for Papers
The Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR) invites proposals for panels and individual papers at its annual conference, June 25-27, 2009, to be held at the Marriott Hotel in Falls Church, Virginia.  Although proposals for individual papers will be considered, proposals for complete or nearly complete panels are encouraged and will receive preference. In order to receive full consideration, proposals should be submitted no later than December 1st, 2008.

The Program Committee welcomes panels and paper proposals that deal with the history of United States’ role in the world in the broadest sense.  In order to complement SHAFR’s signature and continuing strengths in diplomatic, strategic and foreign relations history, particularly for the post-1945 period, the Committee especially encourages proposals that deal with non-state actors and/or pre-1945 histories, as well as proposals that involve histories of gender and race, cultural history, religious history, environmental history, transnational history and histories of migration and borderlands.  The Committee also invites applications from scholars working in areas other than U. S. history, and panels that include work by such scholars.  Finally, the Committee welcomes panels dealing with issues such as pedagogy and professionalization.

Panels can follow either of the following formats: (1) three or four papers, chair, and commentator or (2) a roundtable with a chair and participants. The committee also welcomes panels using innovative procedures, such as the circulation of papers prior to the conference to any interested conference attendees.

Panel submissions should total no more than three pages and must include the following information:
1)    the name of each panelist as she/he would like it to appear on the program should the panel be accepted (please check the proper spelling of everyone’s name)
2)     each participant’s institutional affiliation and status (graduate student, assistant professor, lecturer, professor, etc.);
3)    the role of each panelist (presenter, chair, commentator, etc.);
4)    contact information, including a working e-mail address and phone number for each participant.
Each proposal should include a brief rationale, the title of each paper, and a short description of the work to be presented. Each panelist should include a brief bio. Please adhere to the limit of three pages.  One member of each proposed session should be designated as the contact person.
Electronic submissions are strongly encouraged, but paper submissions will also be accepted.  If submitting electronically, please send a copy of your application as a single Word or WordPerfect file attachment to Paul Kramer, program chair, at paul-kramer@uiowa.edu.  If submitting a paper copy of your application, please mark “SHAFR 2009 Proposal” on the front of the envelope, and mail it to:

Paul Kramer
Department of History
280 Schaeffer Hall
University of Iowa
Iowa City, IA  52242

Book Announcement

HOMEBASE

A Novel

Shawn Wong

With a new introduction by the author

(University of Washington Press, May 2008, $12.95 paperback)

University of Washington Press is pleased to announce the publication of a new edition of Shawn Wong’s novel Homebase.  When it was first published in 1979, this coming of age story was lauded as “a poetically rendered tour de force” by Amerasia Journal.  In his new introduction, Shawn Wong describes the book’s initial publication, the blossoming of Asian American literature from 1970s forward, and his own development as a writer.  Included in the book are discussion questions, many suggested by professors who teach Homebase in their courses.

Shawn Wong is the author of the novel American Knees and an editor of several anthologies of Asian American literature, including Aiiieeeee! and The Big Aiiieeeee!. His work has been awarded a National Endowment for the Arts creative writing fellowship and numerous other prizes. He is professor of English at the University of Washington, Seattle.

For more information about the book, visit: http://www.washington.edu/uwpress/search/books/WONHOM.html

Beth DeWeese
Direct Marketing Manager
University of Washington Press
PO Box 50096
Seattle, WA 98145-5096
206-221-5890 tel; 206-545-3932 fax

Order books at 1-800-537-5487 or on our website:
www.washington.edu/uwpress

Honolulu, Hawai`i - The Department of American Studies at the University of Hawai`i at Manoa is pleased to announce that Theodore S. Gonzalves has been promoted to the rank of Associate Professor with tenure. The University of Hawai`i Board of Regents approved University President David McClain’s recommendation for promotion and tenure on May 29, 2008.

Since his appointment in the Fall of 2002, Professor Gonzalves has taught more than 400 students enrolled in 32 undergraduate and graduate-level courses. He cross-lists courses with the Department of Ethnic Studies and maintains an affiliation with the Center for Philippine Studies and the Program in International Cultural Studies. Before coming to Honolulu, Gonzalves taught on nine California colleges and universities between 1992 and 2002.

Professor Gonzalves’ numerous publications include a well-received anthology of interviews and essays titled Stage Presence: Conversations with Filipino American Performing Artists (Meritage Press, 2007). He is currently finishing work on a monograph titled Seditious Play: Performing in the Filipino Diaspora (Temple University Press, forthcoming), and a collection of essays focusing on the work of the renowned visual artist and educator, Carlos Villa.

Professor Gonzalves’ awards and recognition include a U.S. Fulbright Senior Scholar postdoctoral fellowship as well as being named a Visiting Scholar and Artist to the American Academy in Rome.

Professor Gonzalves earned a Ph.D. in comparative culture at the University of California at Irvine, a master’s degree in political science from San Francisco State University, and a bachelor’s degree in political science from Santa Clara University. Born and raised in Fort Ord, California, Gonzalves currently lives in Honolulu, Hawai`i.

–

DEPARTMENT OF AMERICAN STUDIES
UNIVERSITY OF HAWAI`I AT MANOA
1890 EAST WEST ROAD, MOORE 324
HONOLULU HI 96822
(808) 956-8570 Office
(808) 956-4733 FAX