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Lisa Nakamura has been awarded tenure in Summer 2007. She is now Associate Professor in both the Institute of Communications Research and Asian American Studies. Professor Nakamura is an Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities (IPRH) Fellow for the 2007-2008 academic year. Congratulations!

The Balgopal Lecture on Human Rights and Asian Americans
AAS is very pleased to announce that Pallassana R. Balgopal and Shyamala Balgopal have generously established a permanent fund to support an annual lecture on human rights and Asian Americans.
Funds will be used annually to bring an outstanding invited lecturer to campus whose scholarship and talk focus on issues of marginality and oppression experienced within Asian American, communities, which may include a focus on issues such as social and economic disenfranchisement and political struggles for empowerment and social justice. The first lecture is to be given in spring semester 2008.
Every four years, the Balgopal lectures will be assembled and published as occasional papers to be sent to UIUC faculty and to AAS programs across the U.S. with the objective of bringing exposure to scholarship produced for the lecture and to the activities of the AAS Program at UIUC.
AAS is deeply appreciative of and thankful for Pallassana and Shyamala Balgopal’s support and for their continuing legacy of generosity to the Program.

Esther Kim Lee received tenure in Spring 2007. She also won the 2007 Research Award for Outstanding Booklength Study in Theatre Practice and Pedagogy given by ATHE (Association for Theatre in Higher Education) for her book, A History of Asian American Theatre. Congratulations!

Mimi Nguyen, Assistant Professor of Asian American Studies and Gender & Women' Studies, co-edited an anthology (with Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu), Alien Encounters: Popular Culture in Asian America, published by Duke University Press in 2007.

Friday, March 2, 2007. Tenth Anniversary Celebrations of the Asian American Studies Program.    
12:45-6:45 PM. Knight Auditorium, Spurlock Museum
                           Click on image for flyer.

AAS is pleased to welcome four new faculty members: Soo Ah Kwon (Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley); Fiona Ngô (Ph.D., University of California, Irvine); Mimi Nguyen (Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley); and Lisa Nakamura (Ph.D., CUNY Graduate Center).

The Program also welcomes Shelley Lee, the new postdoctoral fellow for the 2006-2007 academic year.

AAS welcomes Viveka Kudaligama as the new Asian American Studies Assistant Director.

Congratulations to Augusto Espiritu and Moon-Kie Jung, who both received tenure.

Moon-Kie Jung, Associate Professor of Sociology, published Reworking Race: the Making of Hawaii's Interracial Labor Movement in 2006 by Columbia University Press.

Esther Kim Lee, Assistant Professor of Theatre, published A History of Asian American Theatre in 2006 by Cambridge University Press.

Susan Koshy, Associate Professor of English and Asian American Studies, received the 2005 Choice Outstanding Academic Title Award for her book, Sexual Naturalizations: Asian Americans and Misceginations.

Augusto Espiritu, Associate Professor of History, will be a Mellon Fellow for the 2006-2007 academic year.

Yutian Wong, Assistant Professor of Dance, will be an IRPH fellow for the 2006-2007 academic year.

Susan Koshy, Associate Professor of English, will have Humanities Release time for the 2006-2007 academic year.

AAS is pleased to announce that Jennifer Chung joins us as the program's Interim Assistant Director. Chung has broad administrative experience from her five years at the Office of Equal Opportunity and Access at UIUC where she is the principal staff person in efforts to revise UIUC's academic search policies and procedures. Chung is also working on her Ph.D. in Educational Policy Studies.

AAS is pleased to announce the hires of Soo Ah Kwon and Adrienna Lo. Kwon (Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley) has a co-appointment between AAS and Human and Community Development. Lo (A.B.D., University of California, Los Angeles), is currently Lecturer in Educational Psychology at UIUC. Dr. Kwon will join the Program in August 2006.

The Program also welcomes postdoctoral fellows Chris Lee, Michael Masatsuga, and Fiona Ngô for 2005-2006.

Nancy Abelmann, Associate Professor of Anthropology and AAS, has been selected by the Society for Urban/National/Transnational Anthropology as the winner of the 2004 Leeds Prize for outstanding contribution to urban anthropology for her book The Melodrama of Mobility: Women, Talk, and Class in Contemporary South Korea. She will also be the Director of the Center for East Asian and Pacific Studies starting in Fall 2005.

Pallassana Balgopal, Professor Emeritus of Social Work, has been invited to serve as a Fulbright Senior Specialist at Viswa Bharti University in Shantiniketan. In 2000 he served as a Senior Fulbright Fellow and helped redesign the Social Work curriculum. His upcoming assignment will be to evaluate the revised curriculum. This university was established by the Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore who read his famous book of poems Geetanjali at the Channing Murray Foundation at the UIUC campus.

Lisa Cacho, Assistant Professor in AAS and Latina/o Studies, will be a Center on Democracy in a Multiracial Society fellow for the 2005-2006 year.

Augusto Espiritu, Associate Professor of History, published Five Faces of Exile: The Nation and Filipino American Intellectuals in 2005 by Stanford University Press.

Susan Koshy, Associate Professor of English and AAS, published Sexual Naturalization: Asian Americans and Miscegenation in 2005 by Stanford University Press.

Kent A. Ono has released two new books: Asian American Studies After Critical Mass (2005) and A Companion to Asian American Studies (2005), both by Blackwell Publishing.

Junaid Rana, Assistant Professor of AAS, will be an Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities fellow in the 2005-2006 year.

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