News and Announcements
Professor Mae Ngai was recently featured on 60 Minutes Overtime and MSNBC in a segment called, “The blueprint of Trumpʻs deportation plan: A questionable approach by Eisenhower.” Professor Ngai spoke about Donald Trump’s plans to use Pres. Eisenhower’s mass deportations in the 1950s as a model for deporting millions now.
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Marie Myung-Ok Lee, Writer in Residence at CSER, recently published a piece in Salon.com called “Like Tim Walz, we were also wrongly accused of abusing our special needs son.” Click here to read.
Mae Ngai’s new book, Corky Lee’s Asian America: Fifty Years of Photographic Justice (coedited with Chee Wang Ng), was reviewed in the New York Times, the New Yorker, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the PBS-News Hour.
Ngai also discussed the book in several interviews and podcasts, including They Call Us Bruce.
On March 8th, 2024, International Women’s Day, Professor Elsa Stamatopoulou, Director of ISHR’s Indigenous Peoples’ Rights Program, was granted a Lifetime Achievement Award by the New York City Bar Association, on the occasion of the 5th International Law Conference on the Status of Women.
The award, established in 2020, recognizes women and women-centric organizations focusing on justice work. The International Law Conference dealt with the current status of women and highlights the role of judges, lawyers, human rights experts and policy advocates working to improve the status of women and girls by enforcing their legal rights through accountability and improving their economic opportunities to support themselves and their families.
Before joining Columbia University in 2011, Elsa spent 23 years working on human rights issues at the United Nations, in addition to seven years as the first Chief of the Secretariat of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues starting in 2003.
Karl Jacoby, Allan Nevins Professor of American History – Department of History, was named as a recipient of the 2024 Lenfest Distinguished Faculty Award for his deep commitment to teaching and mentoring, his curricular advancements in areas such as the history of the borderlands, Indigenous peoples, ethnicity and racialization, and the environment, and his role in strengthening the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race as its co-director. The annual awards, established by former University Trustee Gerry Lenfest, recognize faculty excellence across the Arts and Sciences.
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Writer in Residence at CSER, Marie Myung-Ok Lee, was recently published in both the New York Times and Bomb Magazine.
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Dr. Mae Ngai, Lung Family Professor of Asian American Studies and Professor of History, will be awarded the 2024 CUAFA Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award, and Dr. Yuan Yang, Associate Professor of Materials Science, will be awarded the 2024 CUAFA Young Investigator Award at the Third CUAFA Annual Fundraising and Gala Dinner.
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Matt Sandler, Program Director for MA in American Studies, published an essay in The Baffler about the novelist, screenwriter, critic, and folklorist Cecil Brown. “Stand Up and Spout” focuses on his hard-fought and quixotic attempt to revive, using artificial intelligence technology, the enslaved poet George Moses Horton.
Mae Ngai, Professor of History and Lung Family Professor of Asian American Studies, has recently been published in the New York Times, “Ron DeSantis ‘Banned China From Buying Land in the State of Florida.’ How Did We Get Here?”
Carlos Alonso Nugent and Emma Shaw Crane were awarded the 2022 Annette Kolodny Prize, given by the Environmental Justice Caucus, and awarded to the best environmentally-themed paper presented at the annual American Studies Association Meeting.
Excerpt from the announcement:
The Annette Kolodny Prize Committee of the ASA Environmental Justice Caucus is proud to announce the winners of the 2022 Kolodny Prize for Best Environmentally-Themed Paper at the Annual ASA Meeting: Emma Crane and Carlos Alonso Nugent. These two winners presented deeply researched and theoretically sensitive papers about places produced by war and colonial border conflict.
Emma Shaw Crane for “Lush Aftermath: Labor, Landscape, and War in the Suburb”
Emma Shaw Crane’s paper situates us in Homestead, Florida, home to a military base, a detention camp for migrant children, and a military Superfund site: a place “produced by war,” as Crane writes. Crane connects these martial sites with their unlikely near neighbors: ornamental plant and palm nurseries staffed largely by Maya migrants from Guatemala. Deploying theories of racism by Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Jodi Melamed, Crane explores the suburb of Homestead, Florida as a constellation of sites that seem separate, but are in fact intimately connected as products of war. Working from extensive ethnographic research, Crane argues that landscapes of war need to be understand as both “ruinous, destructive, and disordered” and also as “ordered, lucrative, and lush.”
Carlos Alonso Nugent for “Mescalero Apache Imagined Environments across the US-Mexico Borderlands”
Carlos Alonso Nugent’s paper excavates the work of the Binational Boundary Commission, created after the U.S.-Mexico War of 1846-1848. This commission of explorers and engineers created a wide array of borderland media: charts, sketches, fieldnotes, maps, formal reports, and—significantly—representations of Mescalero Apache and Chihene Apache art that reveal alternative ways of dwelling in and representing the desert. Nugent reads the work of the Boundary Commission’s as a colonialist “struggle against harsh terrain, but also against imagined environments”: namely the imagined environment of the Apache. The Boundary Commission’s report inadvertently brought to light, preserved, and recirculated Apache epistemologies, acts of resistance, aesthetics, and ecological knowledge. The survival of these ecomedia helps us see, as Nugent demonstrates, how “this Indigenous imagined environment has moved beneath and beyond its settler counterparts.”
PRIZE WINNERS
Academic Excellence
Junet Bedayn, Grace Fox
Best Thesis
Benjamine Mo, Nikita Leus-Oliva
Special Citation: Student Leadership and Service
CSER Student Advisory Board
GRADUATES
MAJORS
Ezequiel Baiza, Junet Bedayn, Zane Braudrick, Rachel Chang, Adelina Correa Loftus, Grace Fox, Sofia Grosso, Benjamine Mo, Deja Operana-Fox, Kianna Pete, Antonio Rodriguez, Karime Sanchez, Samuel Slater, Rae Stokes, Nathalia Tavares
CONCENTRATORS
Lisbel Guzman, Kaya Kim, Euni Lee, Michelle Molina, Pooja Patel
Nominated Work: Seeing Red: Indigenous Land, American Expansion, and the Political Economy of Plunder in North America
A piercing analysis of exploitative colonial arrangements made by the U.S. in the settling of the Old Northwest, and of Native resistance.
Please join us in congratulating Professor Shana Redmond on her award of a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation.
Professor Mae Ngai delivered the Hatfield Lecture for the Oregon Historical Society at the Schnitzer Concert Hall in Portland on March 27 and the Holden Lecture at the University of New Hampshire on April 4.
The auditorium in Avery was full for a teach-in on Ethnic Studies on March 24, sponsored by the CSER Student Advisory Board and Azine. Speakers included veterans of the 1996 ethnic studies hunger strike, Sung E Bai, Liz Kaufman, and Irene HongPing Shen. Grad student Ethan Chua led an interactive workshop on effective student organizing.
Marie Myung-Ok Lee’s book “The Evening Hero” was highlighted in Columbia’s Article “These 9 Faculty Books Will Make Terrific Holiday Gifts.” It is a novel that follows the life of a Korean immigrant, Dr. Yungman Kwak, by moving back and forth between the past and the present.
