Catherine Fennell

Comparative Ethnic Studies and Anthropology

My work examines the cultural transformation of the American welfare state and the effects of this transformation on the politics of citizenship, belonging and race within redeveloping cities. Through my ethnographic research, I focus on how large-scale changes in the urban built environment shape the ways in which urbanites come to understand social difference, and practice new forms of social care, concern and intimacy. In particular, I am interested in how the sensory and affective qualities of everyday urban life cultivate personal attachments to a place, as well as compel private commitments to the people associated with that place. My doctoral research investigated Chicago's ongoing public housing reforms as a policy experiment that conjoins the palpability of past and impending state failures to provide for citizenry well-being with the potentials of "post welfare" forms of social belonging. My research plans include continued work on this project, as well as research on the ethics of "green" urbanism and sustainable urban redevelopment movements in the United States. Publications: [forthcoming] " 'Project Heat' and Sensory Politics in Redeveloping Chicago Public Housing," Ethnography.

John Gamber

Comparative Ethnic Studies and English

B.A., University of California, Davis, M.A., California State University, Fullerton (both in Comparative Literature), Ph.D., (English) University of California, Santa Barbara. John Gamber's research interests in ethnic and literary studies include ecocriticism, transnationalism, immigration, relocation, American Indian, Asian American, African American, and Chicana/o and Latina/o literatures, and literature of the Americas. He has co-edited Transnational Asian American Literature: Sites and Transits, and published articles about the novels of Gerald Vizenor (Anishinaabe), Louis Owens (Choctaw/Cherokee), and Craig Womack (Creek) among others in several edited collections and journals including PMLA and MELUS. His current book project, entitled Positive Pollutions and Cultural Toxins (University of Nebraska Press) examines the role of waste and contamination in late-twentieth century U.S. ethnic literatures.

Claudio Lomnitz

Latino/a Studies and Anthropology
Email cl2510@columbia.edu
Office 452 Schermerhorn Ext, Mail Code: 5526

Claudio Lomnitz works on culture and politics in Mexico and in the Americas. His books include Evolución de una sociedad rural (Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1982); Exits from the Labyrinth: Culture and Ideology in Mexican National Space (University of California Press, 1992); Modernidad Indiana: nación y mediación en México (Planeta, 1999); Deep Mexico, Silent Mexico: An Anthropology of Nationalism (University of Minnesota Press, 2001); and, most recently, Death and the Idea of Mexico (Zone Books, 2005). Claudio Lomnitz is currently the editor of the journal Public Culture. Lomnitz is the Campbell Family Profrssor of Anthropology at Columbia.

Relevant links: publicculture.org, nuevoexcelsior.com.mx, bostonreview.net/BR31.5/lomnitz.html

Frances Negrón-Muntaner

Latino/a Studies and English
Email fn2103@columbia.edu
Office 422 Hamilton HAll, Mail Code 2880 ~ Office Hours: Tuesdays and Thursdays by appointment
Phone 854-0195

Frances Negrón-Muntaner is an award-winning filmmaker, writer, and scholar. She is the author of Boricua Pop: Puerto Ricans and the Latinization of American Culture (named 2004 Choice Outstanding Book), the editor of four books, including Sovereign Acts (South End Press, 2008), None of the Above: Puerto Ricans in the Global Era (Palgrave 2007), and Puerto Rican Jam: Rethinking Colonialism and Nationalism (University of Minnesota Press, 1997), and director of Brincando el charco: Portrait of a Puerto Rican (1994) and For the Record: Guam and World War II (2007). Negrón-Muntaner is also a founding board member and past chair of NALIP, the National Association of Latino Independent Producers. She currently teaches Latino and Caribbean literatures and cultures at Columbia University.

Relevant links: www.francesnegronmuntaner.net

Ana Maria Ochoa

Director, Center for Ethnomusicology and CSER

Professor Ochoa is Associate Professor of Music at Columbia University. She holds a Ph D in Folklore and Ethnomusicology from Indiana University (1996). Her areas of interest include music and cultural policy, music and armed conflict, intellectual property, and intellectual histories of sound and music in Latin America, with emphasis on Colombia. Prof. Ochoa taught previously at Columbia (2003-2005) and at New York University (2005-2008). She is the former director of the Music Archives of the Colombian Ministry of Culture. She has also been a researcher at the Instituto Colombiano de Antropología e Historia (Colombia) as well as at The Centro Nacional de Información, Investigación y Documentación Musical Carlos Chávez (CENIDIM) in Mexico.

Relevant links: http://www.ethnocenter.org/AnaOchoatoDirectCenter

Gary Y. Okihiro

International and Public Affairs and CSER
Email gyo3@columbia.edu
Office 508 Knox Hall, Mail Code 2880 ~ Office Hours: Tuesdays and Thursday 3:00 - 4:00 PM
Phone 854-0508

Gary Y. Okihiro is a professor of international and public affairs. His books include Common Ground: Reimagining American History (2001); A Social History of the Bakwena and Peoples of the Kalahari of Southern Africa, 19th Century (2000); Margins and Mainstreams: Asians in American History and Culture (1994); and Cane Fires: The Anti-Japanese Movement in Hawaii, 1865-1945 (1991).

Eric Gamalinda

Eric Gamalinda has received several awards for his writing and video work, including the Cultural Center of the Philippines Independent Film and Video Awards [2004], the Asian American Literary Award for Zero Gravity [poems, 2000], the New York Foundation for the Arts [fiction, 1998], and the Philippine Centennial Literary Prize for My Sad Republic [novel, 1998]. Among his recent publications are Amigo Warfare [poems, Cherry Grove Collections, 2007], as well as poems anthologized in Language for a New Century [W.W. Norton] and Structure & Surprise [Teachers & Writers Collaborative], stories in Charlie Chan is Dead 2: At Home in the World [Penguin], The Thirdest World [factory school], and Bold Words: A Century of Asian American Writing [Rutgers University Press], and essays in Vestiges of War: The Philippine American War and the Aftermath of an Imperial Dream [New York University Press] and Pinoy Poetics [Meritage Press]. He was publications director of the Asian American Writers Workshop until 1997, where he co-edited the anthology Flippin': Filipinos on America, Distinguished Visiting Writer at the University of Hawaii in Manoa in 1999, and Visiting Scholar at New York University’s Asia Pacific American Studies Program in 2002-2003. He has been artist-in-residence at Civitella Ranieri [Italy], Association d'Art de La Napoule [France], Chateau de Lavigny Residence pour Ecrivains [Switzerland], Fundacion Valparaiso [Spain], The Rockefeller Foundation in Bellagio [Italy], Hawthornden Castle International Retreat for Writers [Scotland], and The Corporation of Yaddo, The MacDowell Colony, The Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico, The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Ledig House International Writers' Colony [US].

Liliana Gomez

Liliana Gómez works on politics and culture in the Caribbean and Latin America. She holds a Ph.D. in Latin American cultures and literatures from Freie Universitaet Berlin, Germany (2007). Her research interests in political theory, anthropology, cultural history, postcolonial and urban studies, include transnationlism, migration, cultural identity, the urban question, processes of nation-building and institutionalization of culture, cultural and economic modernization. She received the DAAD award for her postdoctoral reseach on modernization processes in the Caribbean (2008-2009). She has co-edited The Sacred in the City (forthcoming), and Entre el olvido y el recuerdo. Iconos, lugares de memoria y cánones de la historia y la literatura en Colombia (Instituto Pensar, 2009). The publication of her book Genealogías y discursos de lo urbano. Teorías políticas y culturales de la megaciudad en América Latina is forthcoming.

Shinhee Han

Shinhee Han, Ph.D. is a psychotherapist in private practice in New York City. Her clinical specializations include Asian and Asian American mental health, transnational adoptees, LGBT population and college students with learning and study skills problems, identity, depression and anxiety. Previously, Dr. Han worked on the staff of counseling services at the University of Chicago, Northwestern University, Barnard College and Columbia University. She has taught clinical psychology and social work courses at Teachers College at Columbia University, New York University, and Pace University. She has published in psychoanalytic journals and books on Asian American mental health, transnational adoption and Asian American gay men.

Sel Hwahng

Sel J. Hwahng, PhD, is a public health behavioral and social science researcher with expertise in transgender and ethnic minority health and HIV/STD risk behaviors. He received his doctoral degree in 2004 from New York University in Performance Studies (Cultural Studies emphasis). During 2004-06 Dr. Hwahng was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Behavioral Sciences Training in Drug Abuse Research Program (T32 DA007233) at National Development and Research Institutes, Inc. (NDRI) in New York City. For 2006-08 Dr. Hwahng's research career at NDRI is supported by a two year NIH Research Supplement to Promote Diversity in Health-Related Research. The supplement augments Dr. Larry Nuttbock's parent project, HIV/STD Infection in an Urban High Risk Population (R01 DA018080) and will allow Dr. Hwahng to expand his scientific expertise in substance use and psychiatric epidemiology among transgendered persons. He is also expanding an ethnographic study he initiated as a Postdoctoral Fellow on male-to-female transgendered communities in New York City and developing a new comparative study of female survivors of mass rape systems during wars in the 20th and 21st centuries. In 2006 he also received an award from the National Institutes of Health Loan Repayment Program for Health Disparities Research, an International Scholarship from the International AIDS Society, and a National Institute on Drug Abuse Directorís Travel Award. Dr. Hwahng is on the Board of Directors of the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission (IGLHRC).

Stuart Rockefeller

Stuart Rockefeller is an anthropologist; his research involves Bolivians, both in Bolivia and Argentina. His first book, to be published in the Spring of 2010, is about the local and transnational spatial practices of the people of the indigenous highland community of Quirpini. In the book, Rockefeller shows how their spatial practices play a crucial role in producing the places they move through, from houses to the Argentine border to the city of Buenos Aires. Currently, he is doing research in preparation for fieldwork on Bolivian immigrant participation in the vibrant social movements of Buenos Aires. In the years since the Argentine economic collapse and social mobilizations of 2001-2002, many new avenues for social participation have opened up for Bolivian immigrants. In some cases, Bolivians claim a public voice as immigrants, and members of a culturally distinct community, but in others, they demand the right to participate as workers or neighborhood residents. This project investigates the kinds of subjects immigrants can and must become in order to speak to Argentine society. Rockefeller has also done work on folkloric representations of culture, the political possibilities of the MAS government in Bolivia, and the role of hearsay both in rural Andean society and in anthropological writing. Rockefeller received his MA and PhD in Anthropology from the University of Chicago; he has recently taught at Haverford College and Fordham University. He is the board chair of the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA).

Elizabeth OuYang

Elizabeth R. OuYang, Esq. has been a civil rights attorney for twenty years. Her areas of expertise include voting rights, immigration, race and disability discrimination in employment, housing and public accommodations, police brutality and hate crimes. Post 9-11, Ms. OuYang served as a 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 affected by post-911 government policies. In 2000, Ms. OuYang was appointed by President Clinton to serve as a special assistant to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. She worked as a staff attorney for eight years with the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund and for three years with the Disability Law Center in Boston, MA. She is a mentor with the Brooklyn Legal Outreach Program that serves underpriviledged high school students, an advisory council member to the Chinatown Youth Initiatives, and a board member of the Organization of Chinese Americans-New York Chapter.

Chie Sakakibara

Chie Sakakibara received her Ph.D. in Geography from the University of Oklahoma (OU) in 2007. She is a cultural geographer interested in global indigenous studies and human-animal interactions. Prior to her Ph.D., she has completed her degrees in Native American Studies (B.A., 2000) and Art History (M.A., 2002) at OU. Her current research focuses on global warming and its influence on traditional human relationships with the bowhead whale (Balaena mysticetus) in the Alaskan Arctic. During her fieldwork among the Iñupiaq people in Barrow and Point Hope, Alaska (2004-7), she was adopted by several whaling families and experienced their subsistence activities including whaling. Chie’s research has been funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) Geography and Regional Science Program and by the Arctic Social Sciences Program. She also works closely with institutions such as the Barrow Arctic Science Consortium (BASC), the North Slope Borough Department of Wildlife Management, the Center for Ethnomusicology at Columbia University, and the Arctic Studies Center at Smithsonian Institution. In the past, Chie has given several invited lectures at various institutions: Columbia University, Tokyo University of Science (Japan), Nagoya University (Japan), Nagoya City University (Japan), the Barrow Arctic Science Consortium and Ilisaġvik College (Barrow, Alaska). In addition to her research, she collaborates with Columbia University’s Center for Ethnomusicology for their Iñupiaq music heritage repatriation project led by Dr. Aaron A. Fox. Chie has served on the faculty in the Native American Studies Program at OU, and in the fall 2008 she will teach Native Peoples of North America in the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race at Columbia University.

Jill Humphries

Carmen Lamas

Bakirathi Mani

Susie Jin Pak

Susanna Rosenbaum

Dorothy Wang