News and Announcements
CSER Writer-in-Residence, Marie Myung-Ok Lee has published an article titled, “The U.S. Military’s Long History of Anti-Asian Dehumanization,” in Gen, a publication from Medium about politics, power, and culture. It is about American soldiers bringing back stereotypes that became embedded in American Culture once they returned home.
CSER Adjunct Professor Elizabeth OuYang is quoted in The Washington Post for her work as a civil rights attorney specialized in combatting hate crimes. As schools reopen, OuYang describes how some Asian American families are fearful of sending their children back due to the rise of anti-Asian racism. Parents and kids have shared stories of strangers harassing them, yelling at them to “speak English” or “go back to your home country.” As a result, families in New York City are fearful of children’s solo commutes to school, opting to keep them at home to learn remotely.
OuYang directs an annual hate crime prevention art project for the nonprofit OCA-NY Asian Pacific American Advocates in New York City.
CSER Adjunct Professor Ed Morales has recently published the following articles: For CNN, Morales describes the change to eliminate the use of “alien immigrant” in President Biden’s immigration announcement. He makes reference to CSER Co-Director Mae Ngai’s Impossible Subjects. For The New York Times, Morales writes a playlist to honor the passing of Johnny Pachecho.
CSER’s Writer in Residence, Marie Myung-Ok Lee, was quoted in an NBC News article arguing for the need for more education in Asian American Studies and history as a recent wave of racist violence is targeted against Asian seniors.
“We’re constantly in a cultural war where we have to fight even to see representation,” said Lee. “It’s a doubly bittersweet idea that Covid is being blamed on us, and yet our suffering and losses are not being acknowledged. Mainstream culture won’t pay attention until it’s made to pay attention. Asian Americans need to be their own advocates.”
CSER Faculty Claudio Lomnitz, Campbell Family Professor of Anthropology, has released his new book, Nuestra América: My Family in the Vertigo of Transition (Other Press, 2021). Named a “Most Anticipated Book of the Year” by Kirkus Reviews, this immigrant family memoir is a riveting study of the intersections between Jewish and Latin American culture that recounts history with psychological insight and the immediacy of a thriller. Listed below are news and events surrounding the release of Professor Lomnitz’s book:
Nuestra América was selected in the “Briefly Noted” section of The New Yorker.
Professor Lomnitz spoke about his book at length in the following book discussions: Harvard Bookstore with Jesús Velasco, Literati Bookstore in Ann Arbor with Jean Comaroff, and Skylight Books in Los Angeles with Graciela Montaldo. University of Michigan’s campus paper amply reviewed Professor Lomnitz’s book discussion with Jean Comaroff, titled Not Next To: The Jewish Diaspora Holding the Center of History.
He will further speak about his new book with Claire Messud at the Brooklyn Library and Leon Botstein at Left Bank Books in St. Louis, respectively, on February 24, 2021.
On February 26, 2021, two radio programs, “Write the Book” and LA Review of Books, will air on February 26, 2021, where Professor Lomnitz discusses his book further.
Sayantani DasGupta’s course for CSER, Abolition Medicine, is featured in The Columbia Spectator as a new course inspired by COVID-19, pushing students to think themselves out of the pandemic. Read Here >>
CSER Lecturer Ed Morales has been recently published in The New York Times, The Nation, and The Washington Post. Morales wrote a review titled, “A journey across America to look at the heart of the Latinx community” in The Washington Post; an article about the privatization of Puerto Rico in The Nation; and an appraisal remembering Miguel Algarín, a founder of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe in The New York Times.
CSER Writer-in-Residence, Marie Myung-Ok Lee wrote a piece about anti-Asian violence for ZORA, the BIPOC channel on Medium. Read it here >>
CSER Faculty, Claudio Lomnitz, was elected member of Mexico’s Colegio Nacional, which is a great honor. The Colegio Nacional has existed since 1943, and it has a maximum of 40 members, divided equally among the hard sciences, the biological and medical sciences, the social sciences, and arts and letters. It is a lifelong membership. Read article here >>
Carla Fredericks, Columbia Law School alumna, scholar, lawyer and advocate for Indigenous Peoples’ rights in governance, development, and global policy has been appointed as the new Executive Director of The Christensen Fund. Carla Fredericks currently serves as Clinical Professor and Director of the American Indian Law Clinic at Colorado Law.
As an enrolled citizen of the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Nation of North Dakota, Ms. Fredericks will be the first Native American to lead The Christensen Fund, and the first Native person to lead a private foundation of its size. She will assume her role in January 2021.
We congratulate Carla Fredricks and wish her every success in this new exciting path and look forward to continuing collaboration for Indigenous Peoples’ rights.
The Institute for the Study of Human Rights, through its Indigenous Peoples Rights Program, will participate at the International Congress of Cultural and Creative Industries 2020. The Congress is organized online by the Ministry of Culture of Jalisco and The Office of UNESCO in Mexico. CSER Professor Elsa Stamatopoulou, will give a keynote address on 28 October on “Cultural Rights in the Covid Crisis”. For accessibility reasons, all activities of the congress will be transmitted live on Cultura Jalisco (Ministry of Culture of Jalisco) Facebook Page >>
CSER Faculty, Frances Negrón-Muntaner, founding director of the Media and Idea Lab and the Latino Arts and Activism Archive, is featured in The Texas Observer article, “The Latino Vote And Its Legacy.” “There’s no single Latino story about the relationship of citizens and the state when it comes to elected power,” Professor Negrón-Muntaner said. “There are multiple stories.”
CSER faculty Claudio Lomnitz discusses in a podcast episode of Unpacking Latin America the plight of the more than 70,000 disappeared or missing people in Mexico and their search by family members. This search does not confront a strategic plan but a complicit and weak state, which contributes both willingly and unwillingly. He further talks about Mexico’s violence as a symptom of government incapacity and its links to the militarization of security, which has continued under the presidency of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador. Listen on Spotify and SoundCloud >>
Marie Myung-Ok Lee, Writer in Residence at CSER, is featured in a Publishers Weekly article that focuses on how women authors cope with the pandemic and how COVID-19 has affected their work.
CSER Co-Director Karl Jacoby is quoted extensively in NBC 5 Dallas-Fort Worth article that details the work of scholars and historians piecing together the story of the Underground Railroad in Texas, which helped thousands of enslaved Blacks emancipate themselves by escaping to Mexico.
Media and Idea Lab’s Frances Negrón-Muntaner speaks with Elisabetta Diorio in a special feature in the Films for the Feminist Classroom Journal discussing feminist film pedagogy.
Read CSER’s Adjunt Professor OuYang’s “Two Recent Supreme Court Decisions and Changing Demographics Underscore the Importance of US Citizenship,” which was recently published in the University of California Berkeley School of Law’s Asian American Law Journal.
Professor Sayantani DasGupta has newly published a chapter book biography, She Persisted: Virginia Apgar. Additionally, Professor Sayantani has published two new articles: “Pedagogy of the Pandemic: Narrative Medicine and Radical Empathy” in Synapsis and “Abolition Medicine” (with Yoshiko Iwai and Zahra Kahn) in The Lancet.
MPR News interviews CSER Professor Marie Myung-Ok Lee on Asian-American representation in children’s media, following a discussion of the same in Ann M. Martin’s Baby-Sitter’s Club, now a Netflix series. Read the article here.
CSER honors student Amanda Qi Xin Ong, who has created a website to share her thesis, “as you left it,” a creative nonfiction oral history, through mixed media.
