Darius V. Echeverría is a historian, public speaker, writer, editor, and onscreen commenter specializing in the Latinx experience in American popular culture. As such, he continues building a career as a scholar and professor who, through writing, teaching, and research, brings historical insights to contemporary debates about American identity and culture.  He earned his doctorate and an M.A. in American History from Temple University. He also holds a B.A. magna cum laude in History from Rutgers University. As a Lecturer in both Columbia’s Department of History and the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race (CSER), he specializes in Latinx Studies, Mexican American History, Political History, Social Movements, and Sport and Society.  He currently leads the Senior Project Seminar for CSER, which is designed to develop and hone the skills necessary to complete an advanced senior academic project. In addition to his teaching responsibilities at Columbia, he serves as an undergraduate academic dean for Columbia College and the Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science.  He has held his faculty and deanship appointments at Columbia University since 2013. Since 2006, Professor Echeverría has also been a faculty member for the Department of History and the Department of Latino and Caribbean Studies at Rutgers University-New Brunswick, with the current standing of Lecturer II.

He is the author of Aztlán Arizona (University of Arizona Press, 2014), a history of the Chicano Movement in Arizona during the 1960s and 1970s.  Furthermore, his historical analysis, which often explore inequality and social policy and cycles of agency related to constitutional rights has been reflected in numerous publications, including book chapters, edited works, peer reviewed journal articles, essays, and digital content.  He is currently carrying out research for his next book project while also collaborating with other scholars through an assortment of academic projects and research publications.  He holds several leadership positions in national, statewide, regional, and university organizations, advisory councils, government task forces, and editorial boards as well.

Eric Gamalinda recently published The Descartes Highlands (Akashic Books, NY), his fifth novel and his first to be published in the US, which was shortlisted for the 2009 Man Asian Prize. His poems, stories and essays have been anthologized in Manila Noir (Akashic Books), Language for a New Century (W.W. Norton), Structure & Surprise (Teachers & Writers Collaborative), Charlie Chan is Dead 2: At Home in the World (Penguin), Bold Words: A Century of Asian American Writing (Rutgers University Press), and Vestiges of War: The Philippine American War and the Aftermath of an Imperial Dream (New York University Press), among others. He has been artist-in-residence at various institutions around the world, including The Rockefeller Foundation in Bellagio (Italy), The Corporation of Yaddo and The MacDowell Colony (USA), and most recently, Civitella Ranieri (Italy) and Fundacion Valparaiso (Spain).

Brian Luna Lucero is the Digital Projects Librarian for Columbia University Libraries. In that role, he helps Columbia faculty and librarians develop online exhibits and digital collections based in the library’s archives. He was previously Digital Repository Coordinator, overseeing cataloging and metadata for Columbia’s institutional repository, Academic Commons. Brian has a PhD in history from the University of New Mexico.

Ed Morales is an author and journalist who has written for The Nation, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Rolling Stone, and the Guardian. He was staff writer at The Village Voice and columnist at Newsday. He is the author of Fantasy Island: Colonialism, Exploitation, and the Betrayal of Puerto Rico (Bold Type Books), Latinx: The New Force in Politics and Culture (Verso Books 2018), The Latin Beat (Da Capo Press 2003) and Living in Spanglish (St. Martins 2002). In 2019 Latinx was shortlisted for the Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize for Global Cultural Understanding by the British Academy in London. In 2009, while a Columbia University Revson Fellow, Morales wrote and directed Whose Barrio? (2009) an award-winning documentary about the gentrification of East Harlem. The film was inspired by “Spanish Harlem on His Mind,” an essay published in The Best of the City Section of the New York Times (NYU Press 2005). Morales is also a 2022-23 Mellon Bridging the Divides Fellow at the Center for Puerto Rican Studies in New York.

Elizabeth R. OuYang has been a civil rights attorney for more than thirty years. Her areas of expertise include census, voting rights, immigration, race and disability discrimination in employment, housing and public accommodations, and combating police brutality, and hate crimes. Currently, OuYang is a census trainer with APIA VOTE (Asian Pacific Islander American VOTE), a national organization dedicated to increasing the civic participation of APIA’s. She was a census consultant to the New York Immigration Coalition and the coordinator of New York Counts 2020, the first statewide coalition of more than 100 diverse stakeholder organizations seeking a fair and accurate 2020 Census. Post 9/11, OuYang served as an immigration consultant to the New York Immigration Coalition in collaboration with the City of New York Bar Association to conduct pro bono advice clinics throughout New York City to the Arab, Muslim, and South Asian communities targeted by post 9/11 government policies. In 2000, OuYang was appointed by President Clinton to serve as a special assistant to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. For eight years, OuYang worked as a staff attorney with the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund and with the Disability Law Center in Boston, MA for three years. OuYang is the former past president of OCA-New York Asian Pacific American Advocates.

Elsa Stamatopoulou joined Columbia University in 2011 after a 31-year service at the United Nations (in Vienna, Geneva and New York) with some 22 years dedicated to human rights, in addition to 8 years exclusively devoted to Indigenous Peoples’ rights. Indigenous issues were part of her portfolio since 1983 and she became the first Chief of the Secretariat of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues in 2003. In 2011, she taught the first-ever course at Columbia on Indigenous Peoples’ rights, in 2016, the first course on cultural rights and is the first Director of the Indigenous Peoples Rights Program at the Institute for the Study of Human Rights at Columbia. She is also co-founder and was co-chair of Columbia’s University Seminar on Indigenous Studies from its inception in 2014 to 2020.
Her academic background is in law, international law, criminal justice and political science (Athens Law School, Vienna University, Northeastern University and Graduate Institute of International Studies at the University of Geneva). She has worked on international normative frameworks, institution-building, the rights of Indigenous Peoples and other groups, women’s rights, cultural rights, development, private sector and inter-governmental cooperation. She has collaborated closely with human rights non-governmental organizations around the world and in her native Greece and has received several awards, including the Ingrid Washinawatok El Issa O’Peqtaw Metaehmoh-Flying Eagle Woman Peace, Justice and Sovereignty Award; the award of the NGO Committee on the Decade of the World’s Indigenous Peoples; the award of the Hellenic Society of International Law and International Relations; the award of Indigenous Women and Biodiversity Network (IWBN); the Eleanor Roosevelt Award of the Human Rights Center and of Voices 21; the Innovation in Academia Award for Arts & Culture, 2016, by the University of Kent (UK); in 2010, the Museum “Tepee of the World” was given her name in the Republic of Sakha, Siberia, Russia. In 2016, she was featured as one of the UN’s 80 Leading Women from 1945-2016. She co-chairs the International Commission on the Chittagong Hill Tracts and is on the Board of the International Work Group on Indigenous Affairs (IWGIA) and other boards.

Elsa Stamatopoulou’s Publications