Student News || Alumni News STUDENT NEWS AND NOTES Summer, 2006 Our current roster of MTL students in the first four years is continuing the tradition of activism and participation that has always been one of MTL's hallmarks. During his first year at Stanford, Adam Rosenblatt (05 cohort) was student representative on the Committee in Charge, along with his cohort partner, Vascile Stanescu. Adam spoke about the ethics of international forensic investigations at the Human Rights Colloquium and was an active participant in the Humanities Center's "Global Justice Workshop." He will be Student Coordinator for the workshop in 2006-07. Nigel Hatton and Jayson Sae-Saue (04 cohort) will team up with Steven Lee (02 cohort) as coordinators for the "American Cultures" Humanities Center Workshop for 2006-07. Peter Samuels (04 cohort) was the 2005-06 graduate student coordinator for the Humanities Center Workshop, "Modernity and Postcoloniality." He was also a participant at the SHC Workshop on "Global Justice." He was a Panel Chair at the CASA Graduate Student Conference, and presented a paper, titled "Archive Fever? History and Anthropology Today" at the CASA Brown Bag Forum. Regina Arnold (03 cohort) will give a paper at the Conference on Interdisciplinary Media Studies in London this summer. Sarah Richardson (03 cohort) received a grant from the Patrick Suppes Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of Science and Technology to organize a Science and Technology Studies Writing Group and Graduate Student Conference at Stanford in 2006-2007. This summer, Sarah presented on the gender roundtable at the Future Directions in Biology Studies workshop at Indiana University. In May, she presented at the Bay Area Feminism and Philosophy Workshop. In April 2006, Sarah received the Marjorie Lozoff Graduate Essay Prize for a paper the impact of feminism on the field of sex determination genetics. In January , Sarah organized a Conference sponsored by the Humanities Center and CCSRE, Revisiting Race in a Genomic Age, and she is co-editing a book by the same title (Rutgers, forthcoming). She was also the graduate student coordinator for the Humanities Center Workshop, Revisiting Race and Ethnicity in the Context of Emerging Genetic Research. In summer of 2005, she participated in a Summer Graduate Intensive in Biostatistics and Epidemiology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. In April of 2005, Sarah organized the MTL conference Rational Choice Theory and the Humanities. Ulka Anjaria (02 cohort) spent 2005-06 in India, writing her dissertation in Mumbai and conducting dissertation research in New Delhi under the Graduate Research Opportunities grant and the O'bie Shultz Fellowship for Dissertation Research from the Stanford Institute for International Studies. She presented at a paper entitled "Indian Realism and its discontents: Rethinking the aesthetics of an alternative modernity" at the Arts and Aesthetics in India Conference in Calcutta. Ulka also co-wrote and published a review essay, "Modernity's Split Subject," on recently published works of Mulk Raj Anand, for the November-December, 2005 of Biblio. Ulka will be the MTL Student Liaison for 2006-07. Tomas Matza (02 cohort) spent the 2005-06 year in Russia with a Fulbright-Hays and an American Social Science Research Council (SSRC) Dissertation Research Fellowship. He will be returning to the Bay Area in September. In May Steven Lee (02 cohort) presented a paper entitled "Viktor Tsoi at Sundance: Soviet Counterculture and the Korean Diaspora" at David Palumbo-Liu's Asian American Film Symposium here at Stanford. (Cohortmate Ju-yon Kim also gave a paper at the symposium, as did MTL alum Celine Parre–as Shimizu.) He'll be giving the paper again in November at Ann Arbor (at a conference entitled "Routes into the Diaspora"Ñin a neat coincidence, another MTL alum, Helle Rytkonen, is also slated to speak), and will also give a paper on Langston Hughes' "Moscow Movie" at the ASA conference in Oakland in October. This past year Steven has been serving as a consultant for a documentary film being produced by the University of Michigan's Korean Studies Program about the Korean minority in Kazakhstan. It's entitled "Koryo Saram: The Unreliable People," and will debut in October at the Smithsonian Institution. He is currently organizing the film's West Coast premiere and a panel discussion, scheduled for November 13 on the Stanford campus. And our advanced students have been busy as well . . . Maya Dodd will be submitting her dissertation in September. She has accepted a Postdoctoral Fellowship in South Asian Studies at Princeton for 2006-07 During her year as Dissertation Fellow at the Research Institute for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, Vida Mia Garc’a continued work on "The (Other) Tourist and the River City: Heritage Tourism, Narratives of Citizenship, and Chicana/o Cultural (Re)production in San Antonio, Texas." In March, she presented a new chapter to the RICRSRE Graduate and Visiting Faculty Fellows, and in April she was awarded CSRE's Graduate Teaching Fellowship for 2006-07. However, Vida Mia will spend this coming year getting acclimated to her newest role at Stanford: in August, she was named Assistant Dean of Students, and will assume the role of Assistant Director of El Centro Chicano as of September 1. Jacqueline Jenkins spent the 2005-06 academic year completing an M.A. in Education and a California teaching credential in English at Stanford's School of Education. During that year she garnered wide experience, teaching in the American Studies Honors College, acting as a graduate mentor for CSRE, teaching in the Education Program for Gifted Youth during the summer, and last, but not least, teaching 11th/12th Grade Humanities at the June Jordan School for Equity in San Francisco. She has accepted an English position in the Community Partnerships Academy at Berkeley High School while she continues to write her dissertation. She FINALLY moved to Oakland where she will happily celebrate her son Noah's 7th wonderful birthday this September. Life is so very good! Having completed her J.D. at Yale University in May, Allegra McLeod will clerk for Judge Margaret McKeown of the 9th Circuit Court during the 2006-07 year, continuing to work on her dissertation, and go back to research and writing full time in September of 2008. Flavio Paniagua has been in Los Angeles gathering information and doing research on immigrant rights organizations. Flavio has been awarded a CSRE Dissertation Fellowship for the 2006-07 academic year. As MTL Student Liaison for 05-06 Teresa Pellinen-Ch‡vez organized the spring quarter Colloquium series and the May Symposium. A chapter of her dissertation "Postcards from the Andes" is appearing in a forthcoming SUNY volume, "EcoSee: Image, Rhetoric, and Nature." She is an invited speaker at a conference in Germany, "Of Fatherlands and Motherlands: Gender and Nation in the Americas." In the summer of 2005, Teresa presented paper at Peru's annual anthropology conference, "IV Congreso Nacional de Investigaciones en Antropolog’a." In the fall of 2005, she served as vice-president for the "Vernacular Colloquium," an international conference held in Puebla, Mexico. She will be co-chairing a panel and presenting a paper at the American Anthropological Association meeting in November. Teresa will be going on the job market this year and will be a CCSRE Teaching Fellow in at Stanford in 2006-07. On a personal note, Teresa is recently engaged and is planning a wedding for next July. Beth Piatote was an invited speaker on a plenary panel at the conference "Indigenous Women and Feminism: Culture, Activism, Politics" at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, where she gave the paper, "Beyond Feminism: Toward a Theory and Politics of Kinswomanism." In February, 2006, she co-organized a conference on "Intersections of Native American Culture, Politics and Law," at which she also presented the paper "Positive Injury: Love, Land, and Los in Mourning Dove's Cogewea". Beth's proposal for a paper was accepted for the American Studies Association Annual meeting in October, 2006. Beth taught an upper level undergraduate interdisciplinary course in Ethnic Studies, "Native America: Geographies of Resistance" at the University of Oregon and will teach another course, "Ethnicity in America" in 2006-07. Beth was honored with several possible fellowship opportunities and has accepted the Stanford Whiting fellowship for 2006-07. On a personal note, Beth, her husband Scott, and their daughter Twyla welcomed baby Diego into their family on June 7, 2006. Sarah Ramirez-Barba returned to California after completing her Master of Public Health (MPH) in Epidemiology at Columbia and is continuing to work on her dissertation. In March, Richard Simpson attended the American Association of Geographers conference in Chicago, taking part in the formation of "Geographers for Social Justice in Education," an academic activist group organized around issues of education underfunding, work conditions, and access to quality education. In April, he presented a paper entitled "The Public Services and Funeral Services of Silicon Valley" at the Second Annual Brown University Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference entitled "Space as a Category of Analysis; New Perspectives." Rich also organized a RICSRE sponsored Dissertation Writing Workshop at Stanford: "Interdisciplinarity and the Academy." During the past year, Michelle Zamora was an instructor for the Feminist Studies Honors Writing Workshop, a Co-Facilitator for the RICSRE Graduate Dissertation Workshop, "Interdisciplinarity and the Academy," and a TA for the Feminist Studies Honors College. Zamora presented at several conferences: In July 2005 at the Association for Theater in Higher Education (ATHE) Conference in San Francisco, she presented a paper, "Cuerpo (en) Codice-ado/Body as Codex-ized Word: Performance and Xicana/Indigena Thought," with Micaela Diaz-Sanchez at the Latino Focus Group, Bridging Communities, Engaging Creativity. In April of 2006, she presented a paper on "Trenzas for This Malinche: Malinalli as Chicana-Ind’gena Performance & Ritual" on the panel entitled, Pedagogical Performances and Performative Pedagogies: Identity Formation and the Global Production of Knowledge, at the Second Annual Stanford Graduate Student Conference in Cultural and Social Anthropology: The Anthropology of Global Productions. And in June, she presented a paper, "Malinalli as Spiritual Agency: Ritual & Chicana-Ind’gena Performance," at the National Women's Studies Association (NWSA) Conference, Oakland, CA and reprised her paper "Trenzas for This Malinche" at the National Association for Chicana/Chicano Studies (NAACS) Conference in Guadalajara, Mexico. Zamora was honored with a graduate scholarship from the Chicana/Lantina Foundation for 2006-07. ALUMNI NEWS Magdalena Barrera, PhD '05 IHUM Fellow Stanford University Last June, I was awarded a postdoctoral teaching fellowship in Stanford's Introduction to the Humanities Program, and in the fall, began teaching three sections of fifteen students each in a course entitled, "Freedom, Equality, Difference." While I was excited to be involved in this interdisciplinary course with David Palumbo-Liu, Debra Satz and Eamonn Callan, I really had to learn how to think on my feet when teaching John Locke and John Stuart Mill, writers whom I hadn't encountered since my own freshman year of college (and whom I happily had never expected to see again). Nevertheless, I weathered the time demands of teaching, and by December even managed to file my dissertation, entitled, "'Estamos Sumidos': Reading, Hearing and Seeing Mexican America, 1910-1941." Armed with the title of "Dr," I went on to teach "Literature into Life" in the winter and spring. Over the course of the year, I discovered that I thrive on the collaborative relationships I build with students and that I truly love teaching. My students love me back, as they surprised me at the end of the year by writing a song about meÑcalled "Dr. B"Ñand standing on their desks to address me as "O Captain! My Captain!" in the style of Dead Poets Society. This summer, I'm working on revising the literature and music chapters of my dissertation for publication, and expanding the photography chapter into a much larger project that explores memory and narrative in family photo albums. I am also adjusting to the reality of being someone's "wife," a strange but charming concept after thirty gloriously self-centered years. I married Raul Contreras on Sunday, July 2, 2006, in an intimate ceremony at the historic Hotel De Anza in downtown San Jose. Eighty friends and family members were on hand to witness the nuptials and dance the night away. Although I do not plan to change my name, I do now expect everyone to address me as "Doctor." Kyla Wazana Tompkins, PhD '04 Assistant Professor, English and Women's Studies Pomona College I've been at Pomona for two years now and I love my colleagues and my students. I'm getting used to SoCal but I'm still not in love with it. Since coming here I've published two articles, one in Evelyn's anthology on Arab American Feminism and one in the journal of Food, Culture and Society. I have two others under review now and I'm now turning back to the book, having revised the dissertation completely. I hope to have a proposal out in a few months. I've developed seven courses in two years; try not to get stuck doing that. Next year is a sabbatical year and I can't wait for it! Last year I had Evelyn and another MTL alumna, Josie Saldana, out to give talks and to dose me with some MTL fabulousness. Besides teaching tough classes in theory, I'm known for my shoes here at Pomona. Gotta represent! I miss graduate school and Stanford a lot, and the Bay Area most of all. I don't miss poverty but I do miss all of that time to myself... I miss Monica and Jan! Marriage is bliss! Tim and I got married in Toronto and had a very Toronto wedding, starting with a semi-traditional Moroccan henna on Thursday night, followed by two nights of beer-induced revelry and ending with a multi-culti food station wedding: we started with mojitos made with Dominican rum, had Indian, Asian and Italian stations and finished with a Moroccan dessert table. Some of you may remember Tim; he worked as an administrative assistant in the IHUM office. He now teaches in LAUSD. Evelyn Alsultany, PhD '05 Assistant Professor, Program in American Culture University of Michigan - Ann Arbor After leaving Stanford in 2004, I moved to Dearborn, Michigan for a one-year pre-doc at the Center for Arab American Studies, University of Michigan-Dearborn Ð the only Center in the world devoted to the study of Arab Americans. I spent the year teaching, "Arab American Studies: Race, Gender, and Representation," to predominantly Arab and Muslim American students. I also spent the year finishing my dissertation, going on the job market, adjusting to the cold Michigan winters, and enjoying the Arab food in Dearborn. My job market search took me 35-minutes away from Dearborn, to University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, full circle to where I completed my undergraduate degree in 1995. My appointment began with a one-year post-doc and will turn into a tenure-track position as an assistant professor this fall in the Program in American Culture. I am currently revising my dissertation, "The Changing Profile of Race in the United States: Representing Arab and Muslim Americans in the U.S. Mainstream Media" into a book manuscript. I am also working on two edited book projects. One, "Gender, Nation, and Belonging: Arab and Arab American Feminist Perspectives," is co-edited with Rabab Abdulhadi and Nadine Naber and based on a special issue that we co-edited for the Electronic Journal of Middle East Studies in Spring 2005. The other, "The Cultural Politics of the Middle East in the Americas," is co-edited with Ella Shohat and examines cultural representations of the Middle East in both North and South America. In addition, I am curating an exhibit on Orientalism at the Arab American National Museum in Dearborn (scheduled for 2008), the first and only Arab American museum in the world. Michigan has been a particularly good place to be for my work in Arab American Studies. In the winter semester, I will be teaching two new undergraduate courses: "From Harems to Terrorists: Representing the Middle East in Hollywood Cinema" and "Why Do They Hate Us: Perspectives on 9/11." On June 30, 2006, I married Benefo Ofosu-Benefo, my long-time friend and partner of 10 years.
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