2015 Candidate Statements and Biographies

AMERICAN STUDIES ASSOCIATION
ELECTION BOOKLET 2015
The Nominating Committee has posted the 2015 election ballot, together with candidates'
statements and appropriate biographical material on all nominees, accessible only to the
active membership of the association. You must be a 2015 or life member of the
American Studies Association in order to vote.
No mail ballots or election booklets will be printed and distributed. However, the
Nominating Committee is also providing a "fax option" for voting. Members may
download a "faxable" ballot from the web or have a copy emailed from the Office of
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2015 will be counted.
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membership number when tabulating the final vote count.
The following positions appear on the 2015 election ballot: president-elect (one position),
member of the council (4 positions), and member of the nominating committee (2
positions). The candidates are listed in alphabetical order without further distinctions.
President-Elect (Choose 1)
Dylan Rodríguez, University of California, Riverside
Robert Warrior, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Council (Choose 4)
Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez, University of Hawai'i at Manoa
Sharon Holland, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Alex Lubin, University of New Mexico
Jodi Melamed, Marquette University
Nadine Naber, University of Illinois, Chicago
Hiram Perez, Vassar College
Steven Salaita, Independent Scholar
Manu Vimalassery, Barnard College
Nominating Committee (Choose 2)
Adriane Lentz-Smith, Duke University
Karen Leong, Arizona State University
Belinda Rincón, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY
Ramón H. Rivera-Servera, Northwestern University
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Continuing Members of Council and Nominating Committee
Information such as institutional affiliation, rank, and principal fields is being provided
about continuing officers and members of the Council and Nominating Committee in
order that electors may consider the same factors regarding balance that the Nominating
Committee is charged to consider. Continuing elected officers and members of the
Council and Nominating Committee are as follows:
Council
Jodi Byrd, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Laura Briggs, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Kandice Chuh, The Graduate Center, City University of New York
Genevieve Clutario, student councilor, Harvard University
Ann Cvetkovich, University of Texas, Austin
Lisa Duggan, president, New York University
Christina Hanhardt, University of Maryland, College Park
Natalie Havlin, secondary schools councilor, La Guardia Community College, CUNY
Hsinya Huang, international councilor, National Sun Yat-sen University, Kaohsiung,
Taiwan
J. Kehaulani Kauanui, Wesleyan University
Marisol LeBrón, student councilor, New York University
Sunaina Maira, University of California, Davis
Martin Manalansan, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Juana María Rodríguez, University of California, Berkeley
David Roediger, president-elect: University of Kansas
Nominating Committee Jodi Kim, University of California, Riverside Shana Redmond, University of Southern California Siobhan Somerville, University of Illinois, Urbana-­‐Champaign Judy Wu, Ohio State University CANDIDATE STATEMENTS
PRESIDENT-ELECT (Choose 1)
DYLAN RODRÍGUEZ is Professor and Chair of the Department of Ethnic Studies at
the University of California at Riverside, where he has worked since completing his
Ph.D. in 2001. A central concern animates his work: how do the historical logics of
racial and racial-colonial violence permeate our everyday forms of state authority,
cultural production, institutionalized knowledge, liberation struggle, and social identity?
How do people actively inhabit histories of racial and racial-colonial violence—make
sense of it, narrate it, suffer it, and revolt against it? What forms of collective genius and
creativity emerge from such historical contexts, and how do these insurgencies
envision—and practice—transformations of power and community?
Prof. Rodríguez is the author of two books: Forced Passages: Imprisoned Radical
Intellectuals and the U.S. Prison Regime (University of Minnesota Press, 2006) and
Suspended Apocalypse: White Supremacy, Genocide, and the Filipino Condition
(University of Minnesota Press, 2009). His other published writings, which include over
four dozen articles and book chapters, have appeared in a wide cross-section of venues,
including American Quarterly, Radical History Review, Colorlines, Social Identities,
Social Justice, and Scholar & Feminist Online, and such anthologies as The State of
White Supremacy: Racism, Governance, and the United States (Stanford University
Press, 2011), Corpus: An Interdisciplinary Reader on Bodies and Knowledge (Palgrave
MacMillan, 2011), and Warfare in the American Homeland (Duke University Press,
2007). In addition to serving as a keynote or plenary speaker in various national and
international settings, Prof. Rodríguez has been an invited guest in numerous media
venues, including Huffington Post Live and radio programs in Los Angeles, the OaklandSan Francisco Bay Area, Montreal, and Santa Barbara. He has served as an editor or
editorial board member for numerous journals and presses, including the University of
California Press, American Quarterly, and the Critical Ethnic Studies Association
Journal. Prof. Rodríguez is a founding member of Critical Resistance: Beyond the
Prison Industrial Complex and the Critical Ethnic Studies Association, and has worked in
and alongside various social movements, grass roots organizations, and activist
collectives.
STATEMENT: It is clear that ours is more than just another “interdisciplinary”
academic organization… that its animating spirit is one that embraces intense debate
while exhibiting an often profound generosity… that in its very vulnerability to
challenge, disruption, and transformation, the ASA just doesn’t sit still, not for a minute,
not for a second! Such is this thing’s—our thing’s—greatest capacity and power… that it
is a responsive, dynamic, supple place that invites both scholarly rigor and audacity,
while retaining a deep sense of intellectual responsibility to a historical record.
As I write to you in the midst of another wave of outrage and protest over the shape of
American things, my most fundamental commitment to you is to celebrate and accelerate
the forms of intellectual, cultural, and political movement that the ASA invites,
legitimates, and actively produces in its most creative moments, from past to future. I
offer a few specific ideas for our collective work here, each of which grows from my
connections to the ASA and many of you.
Scholarly force, vulnerability
I came to the ASA through the routes of Ethnic Studies, Black Studies, and Asian
American Studies, nourished by the mentorship and support of numerous colleagues who
have defined our organization over the last two decades, including past and future ASA
presidents (Ruthie, Emory—RIP, Curtis, and David), American Quarterly editors, council
members, graduate student representatives, and independent scholars. I have served our
organization as an Associate Editor for AQ, organizer of multiple special events and
conference panels, and active/founding member of several ASA caucuses. Yet, I believe
the consistent scholarly force of every single ASA gathering—its heart and soul—lies in
the excitement and inspiration provoked by the work of early career tenure-track
scholars, recent (underemployed and unemployed) Ph.D.’s, and graduate students. We
have a responsibility to mobilize the ASA for the professional and intellectual elevation
of our junior colleagues and students, particularly in a time of extreme constriction in the
academic job market.
I would like to see collectively conceived, thematically focused major conference
sessions, plenaries, and special sequential panels featuring the work of junior scholars in
direct dialog with mid-career and senior scholars in their fields. Here, i am imagining
the kind of featured sessions that generate a sense of excitement and productive
nervousness for speakers and audiences alike, and which almost always generate
something memorable. It is crucial, in my view, for the ASA to foster a sense of
anticipation and intellectual empowerment that focuses on our most professionally and
institutionally vulnerable colleagues, and elevates their collective scholarly profile in
order to maximize their capacity to inherit the shared challenges of our collective critical
work. The objective of such a highlighting would not merely be to enhance individual
scholars’ attractiveness for the job market, but rather to incite a more far-reaching
discussion of how emerging generations of interdisciplinary Ph.D.’s must be equipped
and encouraged to work (and thrive) within and beyond the professional trajectories of
the traditional tenure-track job.
Occupational hazards
As a two-term Chair of UC Riverside’s Department of Ethnic Studies, I have learned how
to navigate and leverage the sometimes mind-numbing power structures of the university
and academy, while retaining—and even foregrounding—the socially transformative
orientation of my colleagues’ and students’ critical interdisciplinary work and pedagogy.
I began my time as Chair during the opening moments of the UC system’s implosive
response to the global financial collapse—increased student fees, downsized staffing,
degradation of the conditions of research and teaching, etc. Through this ongoing period
of unrelenting institutional struggle, I have accumulated some practical wisdom and
analytical insight as to how to catalyze the growth and enrichment of an institutionally
marginalized department during times of “austerity,” retrenchment, and political reaction.
I have no doubt that I will be able to put this knowledge to good use if I am given the
responsibility of serving as ASA President.
In this spirit, I would like to introduce a sustained series of conversations, to unfold in the
annual meeting, American Quarterly (perhaps through its “Commentary” section), and
elsewhere, that illuminates the occupational hazards induced by the generally eroding
conditions of our collective labor. Too many of us have been forced to lament, suffer,
and mourn in private over the forms of stress, illness, and pain introduced by our
inhabitation of often-difficult—if not altogether hostile—institutional contexts. Echoing
both the everyday insights and scholarly innovations of many of our colleagues in the
critical fields (from gender studies to disability studies, queer studies to settler colonial
studies, Black radicalism to performance studies), I believe we are obligated to deprivatize this quiet suffering.
Building on the existing scholarly work and life experiences of our colleagues, we must
produce a collective, sustained, and public dialog over the state of our workplace climate,
in order to emphasize the fact that we are in fact a workforce and not merely a collection
of isolated, disembodied “academics.” Our collective wisdom and analytical insights
regarding the grinding, systemic forces of gender, race, sexuality, coloniality, ableism,
class, criminalization, and militarism ought to be translated to concretely address our
own labor/research/teaching conditions.
ASA has shown itself to be a courageous and principled body when supporting people
and communities who are confronting acute forms of political repression and
institutionalized degradation, particularly in its principled public solidarity statements and
recent launch, under current president Lisa Duggan’s leadership, of the “Scholars Under
Attack” project. It can and must demonstrate the same courage and principle in
confrontation with the normalized, low-intensity machinations that undermine the
physiological and spiritual health of its rank-and-file membership.
Abolition
My earliest encounters with the ASA were simultaneous with my organizational,
pedagogical, and scholarly involvement with the revitalization of a US-based movement
for the abolition of gendered-racial incarceration and criminalization regimes. Better
known as the resurgent “prison abolition” movement, this work has been challenged and
transformed in critical moments over the last fifteen years by those working across
feminist, transgender, Black, Native American, Indigenous, Latina/o, queer, and
disability studies. The concept of “abolition” is no longer politically exotic, intellectually
compartmentalized, or geographically reducible to jails, detention, and prisons. Abolition
is becoming a key term, legible across different fields of study and praxis, and is
increasingly speaking to the conditions of empire, dying neoliberalism, gendered sexual
violence, and persistent racial and racial-colonial dehumanizations.
I humbly propose that the ASA initiate a far-reaching, risk-taking, intellectually
catalyzing series of dialogues on the historical idea—the collective and creative
insurgencies—of abolition, linking it to recent scholarship and scholarly-activisms that
continue to deeply examine the connections between multiple regimes of power,
institutional dominance, and state violence. We can undertake this work through a major
edited anthology project that draws from the ASA leadership and membership, a two-part
special issue series in American Quarterly, and series of sponsored sessions at the annual
conference that highlight collaborations between scholars, researchers, teachers,
organizers, artists, and activists of all kinds, from different parts of the world.
Of course, my initial impulse upon being solicited for this presidential nomination was to
say—only partly in jest—“if elected, my first act as ASA president will be to abolish the
ASA presidency!” Yet here I am, a candidate, writing to you with a sense of respect and
even reverence for the legacy of scholarship and leadership that the ASA sustains in its
best moments. I offer myself to you with a sense of humility, and vow that I will bring
principle, generosity, and courage to this position.
ROBERT WARRIOR (enrolled member [citizen] of the Osage Nation): Recent ASA
service: Co-chair, Program Committee, 2014-15; Executive Committee and National
Council, 2009-2012; Co-chair, Program Committee, 2006-7; Program Committee, 20012. Academic appointments: Director, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
American Indian Studies Program, 2008-present; Professor of American Indian Studies,
English, and History, University of Illinois, 2008-present; Edith Kinney Gaylord
Presidential Professor, University of Oklahoma, 2005-8; Professor, Associate Professor
of English and Native American Studies, University of Oklahoma, 2000-8; Director of
Native American Studies (interim), University of Oklahoma, 2003-4; Visiting Associate
Professor of English and American Indian Program, Cornell University, 1999-2000;
Assistant Professor of English, Stanford University, 1992-2000. Ph.D. Systematic
Theology, Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York, 1992; Books: Editor,
The World of Indigenous North America (2015); Reasoning Together: The Native Critics
Collective with Craig Womack, Daniel Justice, Cheryl Suzack, et al (2008); American
Indian Literary Nationalism with Craig Womack and Jace Weaver (2007); The People
and the Word: Reading Native Nonfiction (2006); Like a Hurricane: The Indian
Movement from Alcatraz to Wounded Knee with Paul Chaat Smith (1996); Tribal Secrets:
Recovering American Indian Intellectual Traditions (1995). Selected articles: “Practicing
Native American and Indigenous Studies: 2010 NAISA Presidential Address, NAIS 1:1
(2014); “Native American Studies and the Transnational Turn,” Cultural Studies Review
15: 2 (2009); “A Room of One’s Own at the American Studies Association: An
Indigenous Provocation,” American Quarterly 55: 4 (December 2004). Series Editor,
Indigenous Americas, University of Minnesota Press, 2004-present. Selected fellowships
and honors: 2011 book prizes for the ten most influential books in the first decade of the
twenty-first century, Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (for The
People and the Word and Reasoning Together); Osage Nation Language Program award
for contributions to the revitalization of the Osage language (2011); Inaugural Beatrice
Medicine Award for Scholarship in Native American Studies (2007). Professional
service: Editorial board, American Literature (2012-2015); Founding President, Native
American and Indigenous Studies Association, 2009-11; Chair, Osage Nation Editorial
Board (appointed by Osage Nation Congress, 2009-present); Delegate Assembly, Modern
Language Association (2007-2009); Division on American Indian Literatures, MLA
(2003-2007, chair, 2006).
STATEMENT: The past year has been consequential for the ASA and for me
personally, in large part because of the intertwined controversies surrounding the
association’s endorsement of the campaign for the academic and cultural boycott of Israel
and the firing/unhiring of Steven Salaita just a few weeks before he was to begin a
tenured appointment in the American Indian Studies Program I direct at the University of
Illinois. Not surprisingly, ASA leaders and members were among the earliest to arrive to
help us out at Illinois, and you have been among the most stalwart supporters as we have
responded directly and constantly to the ongoing efforts to deny Steven his justly-earned
place on our faculty and to further diminish the edge of Indigenous critique—not to
mention critical standpoints in many allied fields—on our campus. The ASA is a
professional scholarly association and should always remain that. It’s not primarily a
platform for endorsing one boycott campaign or a set of causes, just as the work we do in
Indigenous studies at Illinois is more than a response to the mistreatment of one scholar
appointed to our faculty. But these are bellwethers that demonstrate the shaping of the
future we participate in as scholars in the twenty-first century, both the crucible that
threatens to crush the critical work we do and the moments when we manage to push
back successfully in spite of the forces set against us. I am honored to be on the ballot for
ASA president, and a little bit surprised. The surprise comes from having been in this
position just a few years ago, not getting the most votes, and promising to wait a long,
long time before contemplating being a candidate again. I had a change of heart and
accepted this spot on the ballot because of how much I have come to value and appreciate
what I gain from this association as part of my scholarly and professional life. The Los
Angeles meeting was incredibly energizing. The Toronto meeting is in a lively, vibrant
setting. Denver, site of next year’s meeting, is in the far western reaches of the homelands
of my Osage ancestors, and it will provide a setting with a unique aura of the
mythological, always already newly born American west, the tragic history of American
expropriation, massacre, and amnesia, the chic boutiques of Aspen and Boulder, and the
brave new world of legalized marijuana use. Our association has met its recent
challenges with a great sense of purpose and renewal. Yet our most important work, as
always, remains in front of us as scholars. Whatever the outcome this time around, I’ll
remain committed to making ASA and the world in which it lives more open and
accessible to those who have spent way too much time on the margins. As an Indigenous
scholar from the Americas, I know all too well what that feels like. Every year, the ASA
feels more like my ASA, and I hope it feels more like your ASA, too, because that’s how it
becomes our ASA. That’s what I am committed to making it.
COUNCIL (Choose 4)
VERNADETTE VICUÑA GONZALEZ is Associate Professor of American Studies
and Director of the Honors Program at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. She received
her PhD in Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, with a Designated
Emphasis in Women, Gender and Sexuality in 2004. Her work is broadly on the cultural
studies of U.S. imperialism with a focus on Hawai‘i and the Philippines, and has been
published in Frontiers, The Global South, as well as in various collections on empire,
gender and labor, militarization, and Asian American popular culture. She is the author of
Securing Paradise: Tourism and Militarism in Hawai‘i and the Philippines (Duke
University Press, 2013). She is currently working on a book project on imperial
intimacies in U.S.-Philippine relations.
STATEMENT: It is an honor to be nominated as a representative for the ASA council. I
have been a member of and participant in the ASA since 2003, and have been most active
with the regional Hawai‘i chapter of the ASA (president, 2008-2010; treasurer 20102012). I currently sit on the editorial board of the American Quarterly, and have found
the work of reviewing the newest scholarship in the field to be rewarding and inspiring.
Having found my academic home in occupied territory in the Pacific, I am constantly
challenged and unsettled by what it means to generate a feminist, anti-racist, queer and
decolonial American Studies from the very center of American empire. I have found my
research, teaching and activism infinitely broadened, critiqued and enriched by the
interdisciplinary conversations and debates that the ASA has made possible, and hope to
further encourage and contribute to the tradition of politically-engaged scholarship that it
has fostered. As a teacher, I have been most drawn to the mentorship of graduate students
(having benefited from supportive mentorship myself) and want to address how the
organization might better serve the needs of graduate students in the era of the
adjunctization of the professorate. As a woman of color in the academy, I am also
attentive to the continued underrepresentation of and particular challenges faced by
minoritized scholars and how we might better challenge the status quo through critical
dialogue and advocacy for structural change.
SHARON P. HOLLAND, Professor and Associate Chair, Department of American
Studies, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is a graduate of Princeton University
(1986) and holds a PhD in English and African American Studies from the University of
Michigan, Ann Arbor (1992). She is the author of RAISING THE DEAD: READINGS
OF DEATH AND (BLACK) SUBJECTIVITY (Duke UP, 2000), which won the Lora
Romero First Book Prize from the American Studies Association (ASA) in 2002. She is
also co-author of a collection of trans-Atlantic Afro-Native criticism with Professor Tiya
Miles (American Culture, UM, Ann Arbor) entitled Crossing Waters/ Crossing Worlds:
The African Diaspora in Indian Country (Duke University Press, 2006). Professor
Holland is also responsible for bringing a feminist classic, THE QUEEN IS IN THE
GARBAGE by Lila Karp to the attention of The Feminist Press (Summer 2007) for
publication (2007). She is the author of The Erotic Life of Racism (Duke University
Press, 2012), a theoretical project that explores the intersection of Critical Race, Feminist,
and Queer Theory. She is also at work on the final draft of another book project entitled
simply, “little black girl.” You can see her work on food, writing and all things
equestrian on her blog, http://theprofessorstable.wordpress.com//. She is currently at
work on a new project, “Perishment” an investigation of the human/animal distinction
and the place of discourse on blackness within that discussion.
STATEMENT: My colleague and friend Lora Romero introduced me to the ASA in the
mid-90s and I have been at every meeting since my first in Nashville. The American
Studies Association meeting is where some of my most important intellectual
conversations and personal friendships have been forged – it is where they will both
continue to grow. I found a home at ASA because I was also interested in
interdisciplinary methodologies and because my work crossed several theoretical and
cultural trajectories, I wanted and needed a more diverse collective mind to engage. Only
at ASA could I find a hearing for my intellectual work and I want the ASA to continue to
be that place for scholars like me whose training is disciplinary, but whose desires are
interdisciplinary at heart. In the wake of the boycott, some have said that the ASA is no
longer the place where the diversity of its membership is richly fostered and deeply
respected. Many at this moment are questioning our own commitments, beliefs and ideals
for ethical action – and this is a good thing; it is why I continue to come to the ASA, and
to turn to its premiere journal for scholarship in the field. I am running for council
because while one person led me to the ASA, another’s commitment to its international
presence – and to issues of academic freedom and diversity – drives me to keep this
aspect of the ASA vibrant and strong. The late Emory Elliott had a deep commitment to
international scholars and scholarship in American Studies. I am determined to continue
that commitment. I have served on the international scholars committee for three years
now and have dedicated myself to bringing more international American Studies scholars
to the table. This means more than just reaching out to scholars across the globe, but
actively involving them as we plan sessions, seek partner’s for year-long endeavors, or
most importantly think about what kinds of resources can be put to the task of bringing
such creative and amazing voices to our own intellectual discussions. If we think truly
transnationally and engage all of the global voices of American Studies, I believe we can
create an even more active and vibrant ASA.
ALEX LUBIN is Professor and Chair of the American Studies Department at the
University of New Mexico. From 2011-2014 he served as the Director of the Center for
American Studies and Research (CASAR) at the American University of Beirut (AUB).
Lubin's scholarship engages global histories of race, the African Diaspora, and America
in the world, with a particular focus on U.S./Middle East relations. He is the author of
Geographies of Liberation: The Making of an Afro-Arab Political Imaginary (UNC,
2014) and Romance and Rights: The Politics of Interracial Intimacy, 1945-1954. He is
the editor of Revising the Blueprint: Ann Petry and the Literary Left; Settler Colonialism:
A South Atlantic Quarterly Special Issue (with Alyosha Goldstein); American Studies
Between the American Century and the Arab Spring (with Marwan Kraidy, forthcoming);
and The Cultural Front in the U.S. War on Terror (with Lisa Hajjar, forthcoming). Lubin
is currently working on a history of a mid-nineteenth century naval ship called the USS
Supply, a ship that was a key link in the global supply chain that enabled American
expansion between the Mexican war and the Spanish American War.
STATEMENT: The American Studies Association has been an institutional home for
me since 1993. From my first encounters with the Association to the present, I’ve seen
the discipline undergo several transformative “paradigm dramas,” largely as a result of
scholarly developments forged in the crucible of social movements. I have been an
active member in the Association, serving on several committees such as the Graduate
Studies Committee, the International Committee, the Conference Site Committee, and the
Conference Program Committee. I was the co-founder of the Caucus on Academic and
Community Activism, which helped draft a resolution in opposition to the second Persian
Gulf War and the resolution to boycott Israeli academic institutions. From 2011-2014 I
served as director of the Center for American Studies and Research at the American
University Beirut, which has become a leading center for transnational American studies
research and graduate training in the Middle East. It was in Beirut that I was most
engaged in both the internationalization of the field of American studies, as well as with
the formation of a transnational vision for the field as something “post-national.” While
in Beirut I was keenly interested in how the question of Palestine, which was everywhere
in Beirut, had been so little a part of my engagement with American Studies in the U.S.
This all changed in 2013 as a result of the ASA’s historic vote to endorse the academic
and cultural boycott of Israel. I was honored to play a key roll in the Association’s
discussions leading up to the vote on the resolution. Moreover, it has been a special
privilege to defend the ASA’s vote in several published media and to think about the
long-term implications of the vote on the Association’s well being. If elected to the ASA
Council I would be especially interested in continuing to support the Association’s efforts
at internationalization and graduate student mentorship. I would also work hard to
continue building the ranks of the membership and talking with various constituents
about the ASA’s brave stands on political issues.
JODI MELAMED is Associate Professor of English and Africana Studies at Marquette
University. She is the author of Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the
New Racial Capitalism (Difference Incorporated Series, University of Minnesota Press,
2011). Her scholarship aims to provide an anti-racist critique of contemporary capitalisms
and an anti-capitalist critique of historically dominant U.S. anti-racisms. Her essays have
appeared in interdisciplinary journals and edited collections including American
Quarterly, American Literature, Social Text, African American Review, Strange
Affinities: The Sexual and Gender Politics of Comparative Racialization (Duke
University Press, 2011), and Keywords for American Cultural Studies, Second Edition
(New York University Press, 2014). In 2007, Melamed received an American Studies
Association Community Partnership Grant to host a community conference on racism,
neoliberal economy, and mass incarceration in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In 2012-2013, she
served as Co-Chair of the Program Committee for ASA’s conference in Washington,
D.C. “Dangerous Associations,” Melamed’s response to Curtis Marez’s 2013 ASA
Presidential Address, appears in the June 2013 edition of American Quarterly. Her
current book project investigates the financialization of racial capitalism since the 1980s.
STATEMENT: I am honored to be nominated to serve on the National Council. If
elected, I would work strenuously to support the strongest realization of the American
Studies Association as a community of scholars and thinkers dedicated to the intellectual
labor that seeks decolonial, antiracist, post-capitalist, abolitionist, queer and as-yetunnamed emancipatory transformations. My participation in the ASA since 1998 has
taught me to see such intellectual labor as historically deep, concrete, ubiquitous,
persistently undone and always at stake. It has taught me that, while there will always be
a contradiction between the ASA as a professional organization, and the ASA as a home,
even a power base, for people committed to insurgent knowledge production and a wide
variety of social movements, the “event” of the ASA meeting can be horizontal,
collaborative, and capacity-building across generations of scholars, disciplines and fields
of engagement. I like to think that this crossing of the line in favor of an expanded
relationality coheres with the decades long engagement of ASA’s membership with
questions of empire, occupation, colonialism, violence, race, gender, sexuality,
nationalism, capitalism and freedom. As a councilor, I would welcome the opportunity to
support the ASA’s long-standing responsibility to incubate rigorous interdisciplinary
scholarship and creative pedagogy in (and beyond) American Studies. I would also throw
my all into helping the ASA fulfill the important new responsibilities which have
emerged out of member commitments in the last years. A very not exhaustive list of these
include: an activist intellectual engagement with the contemporary “university of debt,”
from practical support for graduate students and adjunct faculty, to defense of dissent, to
imaginings of “study” beyond the beyond of the university; to increase the attention of
American Studies on occupations, wars, and U.S. interventions in the Middle East and to
facilitate the participation of people located in the region at the annual meeting; to center
American Indian and Indigenous studies, as these continue to transform the field of
American Studies at multiple sites; to forward the momentum of transformative work on
carcerality and abolition, neoliberalism and concurrent forms of co-resistance; and to
explore carefully, inclusively, and collectively the potentialities and limits of the ASA as
an institutional actor in multiple domains.
NADINE NABER is an interdisciplinary scholar-activist trained in the discipline of
cultural anthropology. She is an Associate Professor in the Department of Gender and
Women's Studies and Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois, Chicago
(UIC). At UIC, she serves on the steering committee of the Social Justice Initiative and
the executive committee of the Institute for Research on Race and Public Policy. She is
author of Arab America: Gender, Cultural Politics, and Activism (NYU Press, 2012). She
is co-editor of Race and Arab Americans (Syracuse University Press, 2008) and Arab and
Arab American Feminisms (Syracuse University Press, 2010). Nadine is a board member
of the Arab American Studies Association and a program committee member of the
American Studies Association. Nadine is an editorial board member of the Middle East
Research and Information Project (MERIP); an advisory board member for the book
series “Expanding Frontiers: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Studies of Women, Gender”
(University of Nebraska Press) and an advisory board member for the book series
“Decolonizing Feminisms: Antiracist and Transnational Praxis” (University of
Washington Press). Nadine conducts workshops and site visits with the Institute of
Women’s Studies at Birzeit University in Palestine as an International Fellow with the
Open Society Foundation’s Academic Fellowship Program (2013-2015). Nadine works
with women of color, racial justice, and Palestine solidarity movements and is a steering
committee member of the US Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel’s (USACBI) and
on the local organizing committee for INCITE!’s upcoming conference, the Color of
Violence 4, Beyond the State: Inciting Transformative Possibilities (March 2015).
STATEMENT: For over a decade, ASA has been an exceptionally productive space for
pursuing my interests in critical ethnic studies, transnational and women of color
feminisms, queer of color studies and Arab American studies. As a council member, I
would be thrilled to contribute my expertise in these areas to ASA: (1) relationshipbuilding with scholars and social movements in the Arab Middle East; (2) understanding
the broad historical, Arab regional and diasporic contexts of Palestinian liberation; the
Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement; and struggles for academic freedom; (3)
linking Arab and Muslim American Studies to Ethnic Studies and American Studies; (4)
bringing women of color and queer of color politics to research, administration, and
activism; (5) establishing funded projects that meet the needs of underrepresented
graduate students and faculty; and (6) organizing workshops related to decolonizing
research methods and grant writing. After many years in which scholarly endeavors
related to Arab and Muslim American Studies have been housed primarily within
conventional disciplines and area studies, I have worked with several colleagues to bring
these fields into American Studies. While at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
(2003-2013), I co-founded Arab and Muslim American Studies as a new Ethnic Studies
unit within the Program in American Culture. This experience made it clear that
American Studies frameworks for addressing race, class, gender, and sexuality do not
always account for the constantly changing shape of U.S. empire and racism and need to
be constantly rethought and revised. At the University of Illinois (since 2014), I am
developing Arab and Muslim American Studies through a “multiple struggles” approach
centered upon principles of social justice, linking contexts such as Gaza and Ferguson,
and rooting teaching and research in principles of accountability to grassroots
communities and social movements. Overall, I have been building connections between
American Studies and the communities targeted by U.S. imperial war (within the US and
abroad) in order to hold these communities at the center of American Studies analyses
and praxis. I have brought this expertise to ASA through efforts such as organizing
sessions with Arab and Arab American feminist scholars and activists; organizing panels
with scholars from Palestine (Los Angeles 2014); organizing a large grassroots event in
Los Angeles on queer organizing and decolonization in Palestine to coincide with the
ASA conference; and organizing panels with the program committee on themes including
multiple struggles and the police state (2014-2015).
HIRAM PEREZ is Assistant Professor of English at Vassar College where he is also
affiliated with the Africana Studies, Latin American and Latino Studies, and Women’s
Studies programs. He received his PhD in English from Columbia University and a
BS/BA in Film Studies/English from the University of Miami. His work has appeared in
the journals Camera Obscura, Cineaste, The Journal of Homosexuality, The Margins,
The Scholar and Feminist Online, Social Text, and Transformations: The Journal of
Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy as well as in the collections Asian American Studies
Now: A Critical Reader, East Main Street: Asian American Popular Culture, and
Reading Brokeback Mountain: Essays on the Story and the Film. He is the author of A
Taste for Brown Bodies: Gay Modernity and Cosmopolitan Desire, forthcoming from
New York University Press (2015). He guest edited the special issue “Teaching Sex” for
the journal Transformations (Fall 2010/Winter 2011). He has served as a representative
on the Delegate Assembly of the Modern Language Association (2009-2011), the
Committee on the Literatures of People of Color in the United States and Canada of the
Modern Language Association (2009-2012), and the Committee on Ethnic Studies of the
American Studies Association (2009-2012).
STATEMENT: It is an honor to be nominated to serve on the National Council. I
attended my first ASA conference in 2000 and have rarely missed a meeting since then,
serving on the Committee on Ethnic Studies from 2009-2012. ASA has been critical to
me during periods of my career when I have felt professionally isolated, and it is one of
my primary goals as a Council member to foster greater opportunities for collaboration at
and beyond annual meetings. This most recent meeting in Los Angeles was a great
success and a model for including participation from cultural workers outside the
academy. I wish to build on its success by thinking of ways to cultivate more connections
with community arts organizations wherever the annual meeting travels. Likewise, I am
interested in initiatives that help us to make such connections at our home institutions as
well as encouraging different models of engaged scholarship. As an Ethnic Studies
scholar, I am eager to meaningfully reconnect my scholarship to the social movements
from which Ethnic Studies emerged. I see ASA as a potential site for renewing and
enlivening these kinds of links. In the past year, we have seen the influence of the ASA
reach beyond the academy and it is critical that we continue to imagine ways of allying
with community activists and decolonial and liberationist movements. It is equally
important that we vigorously support K-12 education, especially in locations where
Ethnic Studies curriculum is under attack. The prospect of greater participation in the
ASA by K-12 educators is an exciting one; I support initiatives for direct outreach to
educators in the locations for the annual meeting. As a member of a prison studies
initiative at Vassar College, I am also eager to support Critical Prison Studies and
abolitionist educators. While at Vassar, I have also worked tirelessly to develop a Queer
Studies correlate. As a result, I am dedicated to developing feminist and queer
pedagogies. I see the ASA as an ideal space to foster innovative critical pedagogy.
STEVEN SALAITA is currently an independent scholar. Prior to my termination from
the American Indian Studies Program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign I
was associate professor of English at Virginia Tech. I am author of six books and
numerous scholarly articles. I have two books forthcoming, one on practices of academic
freedom vis-à-vis Palestine and the other an analysis of decolonization in America and
Palestine. I earned my PhD in English, with a focus on Native American literature, at the
University of Oklahoma.
STATEMENT: My research interests span a number of areas in which the ASA is
invested: Native Studies, ethnic studies, Arab American Studies, decolonization, literary
criticism, and discourse and representation. As I have no institutional home at the
moment, I now consider the ASA my primary affiliation. I am eager to continue working
on issues of academic freedom and the maintenance of a robust organization that faces
numerous external challenges (in relation to the broader challenges facing the
constituencies the ASA represents). I have long been active in the ASA, but I would be
most honored to have a formal role in the organization. I do not believe in artful rhetoric
when asking people for some type of endorsement. Therefore, here are the values to
which I adhere: “civility” is a nonsensical standard increasingly invoked by upper
administrators to regulate critical thought; discussion of race, gender, sexuality, and class
is well-served in the company of decolonial analysis; colonization, wherever it occurs, is
not an issue to be resolved by dialogue that refuses to acknowledge disparate iterations of
power; fighting injustice is absolutely in the purview of the scholar; I fully support the
boycott of Israeli academic institutions and BDS more broadly. Thank you for your
consideration.
MANU VIMALASSERY is currently Term Assistant Professor of American Studies at
Barnard College. His work has been published in the journals and blogs CounterPunch,
Decolonization, J19, SAMAR, and Settler Colonial Studies, in the edited volume
Formations of United States Colonialism, and he is a coeditor of The Sun Never Sets:
South Asians Migrants in an Age of U.S. Power (NYU Press, 2013). His manuscript,
Empire’s Tracks: Plains Indians, Chinese Migrants, and the Transcontinental Railroad,
historicizes capitalism through distinct Plains Indian and Chinese migrant histories.
STATEMENT: It is an honor to be nominated to serve the American Studies
Association. I came to American Studies as I began graduate school, after searching for a
place that supports historically, theoretically and strategically informed transdisciplinary
work, a place to critique social power, broadly speaking. On this score, I have learned not
only from the scholarship, but also from the politics within ASA in recent years,
especially on BDS. My work is grounded primarily in what we have been calling the
Black radical tradition, Indigenous critical thought, and materialist feminisms, and the
imperatives of both Black liberation and Indigenous decolonization have been my
guiding beacons. I have served ASA in the past on the Graduate Students’ Committee. I
have taught at a range of institutions: Barnard College, City College of New York, Texas
Tech University, and Williams College, in adjunct, visiting, and tenure-track positions,
and I have held fellowships at Harvard, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and
Williams. These experiences have given me a particular perspective on the pressures and
exigencies faced by junior scholars (especially those of us who are marked, and in
contingent positions), as we try to sustain ourselves with dignity after the latest round of
structural adjustments.
NOMINATING COMMITTEE (Choose 2)
ADRIANE LENTZ-SMITH is Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate
Studies in the History Department at Duke University, where she also holds a secondary
appointment in African & African-American Studies. She received her PhD in History
from Yale University and her BA in History from Harvard-Radcliffe, and her research
and teaching interests lie at the intersection of African American History, racial
formations, and studies of the United States & the World. Her book Freedom Struggles:
African Americans and World War I (Harvard, 2009) uses the experiences of black
soldiers to trace African Americans’ intertwined and evolving conceptions of manhood,
citizenship, and racial affiliation in the highwater period of white supremacy. She is
currently working on a book project, “’The Laws Have Hurt Me,’ Violence and the Long
Civil Rights Movement,” which explores the link between the state-sanctioned violence
of the mid-century civil rights struggle and the present day disposability of black bodies
writ as criminal. Lentz-Smith served a three-year term on the Minority Scholars
Committee of the ASA and has been on the selection committee for the Laura Romero
book prize.
STATEMENT: I am honored to be considered for the ASA’s Nominating Committee.
Although I trained as a historian, American Studies has been my intellectual home since I
was in graduate school—offering the frames, language, and insights that taught me to be
an African-Americanist who took neither race nor place for granted. Since becoming a
professor, I have worked to give back to the association by serving on committees,
recruiting members, and encouraging graduate student participation. The current vitality
of the ASA speaks to both the intellectual energy and practical urgency of interrogating
the structures—of capital and labor, identity and social differentiation, knowledge and
definition, place and power—that have given shape and meanings to the “American”
project. As a member of the nominating committee, I would encourage leadership who
could nurture this critical, engaged community while also posing critiques and questions
that challenge both scholars and their publics.
KAREN J. LEONG is associate professor of Women and Gender Studies and Asian
Pacific American Studies in the School of Social Transformation at Arizona State
University, where she is also faculty of Film and Media Studies and graduate faculty of
History. She has contributed to the new MA degree in American Studies at ASU, the
ASU Ethnic Studies Working Group, and the ASU Local to Global Feminist Research
Cluster. She helped to organize the Transnational Feminist Institute at Ohio State
University in July 2014. She is the author of The China Mystique: Pearl S. Buck,
Mayling Soong Chiang, and Anna May Wong and American Orlentalism (UC Press,
2005), and the co-editor of a special issue of Feminist Teacher, “Civic Engagement in the
Feminist Classroom. She is co-authoring with Myla Vicenti Carpio a book about the U.S.
relocations of Japanese Americans and American Indians from the 1940s-70s, and coediting with an ASU collective a special issue of Frontiers about transnational
feminisms. She is a founding member for the Committee for the study of Race in the
American West (CRAW) for the Western Historical Association, active in the National
Women’s Studies Association and Association for Asian American Studies, and was
elected to the ASA National Council in 2012.
STATEMENT: I am honored to be nominated for the American Studies Association’s
Nominating Committee. I will complete my term on the Executive Committee of the
American Studies Association in May 2015. The role of the Nominating Committee is
to ensure that the diverse perspectives and locations of the ASA membership are
represented among the National Council, which provides leadership and vision for the
organization. Right now, the association faces a number of challenges: several programs
nationally are under threat of being defunded by university administrations in the name of
restricted budgets; higher education is fundamentally shifting, with a greater reliance
upon adjuncts and untenured faculty; and faculty oversight about the purpose of higher
education is rapidly being eroded by the mandates of the neoliberal university. The
association’s leadership must be able to respond to these challenges and must also
represent those constituencies who most experience these changes within institutions of
higher learning. While the association has been very responsive to the needs of graduate
students, we also need to respond to the growing number of untenured lecturers and
adjuncts, facilitate more discussions about alt-ac careers, and recognize the particular
challenges facing faculty, programs and centers at smaller institutions. If elected to the
Nominating Council, I would seek to nominate members who represent the changing
needs of our membership and will sustain the ASA’s commitments to innovative and
rigorous scholarship, social justice and scholar activism, and collaborations with K-12
and community institutions.
BELINDA LINN RINCÓN is an Assistant Professor of Latin American and Latina/o
Studies and English at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY, and is the cofounder and Co-Director of the U.S. Latina/o Literature Minor Program. Before coming
to John Jay College, she was an Assistant Professor of ethnic American literature at
Willamette University in Oregon. She earned her BA in English and Women’s Studies
from Vassar College, her MA in English from Boston College, and her Ph.D. in English
from Cornell University. Her teaching and research interests include Latina/o literature
and film, U.S. ethnic literature, feminist and gender studies, and war studies. She
specializes in Chicana/o literary and cultural studies. Professor Rincón is currently
completing a manuscript entitled Bodies at War: Genealogies of War and Militarism in
Chicana Literature and Culture that examines Chicana writers and activists whose work
critically engages with the histories of war and the militarization of culture and
gender. She is the recipient of the Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship as well as
fellowships from the American Association of University Women; The Center for Place,
Culture, and Politics at the CUNY Graduate Center; the City University of New York’s
Faculty Fellowship Publication Program; and the American Association of Hispanics in
Higher Education. Professor Rincón has published chapters in The Routledge Companion
to Latina/o Literature and Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage (vol.
VIII). Her articles appear in Women’s Studies Quarterly and Latino Studies. She is the
co-founder and co-organizer of the Biennial U.S. Latina/o Literary Theory and Criticism
Conference.
STATEMENT: Like many members, I have benefitted professionally and intellectually
from my membership in the ASA. I am honored to be nominated to serve one of the
most vibrant interdisciplinary academic organizations in the nation. My previous service
included membership on the Critical Ethnic Studies Committee from 2012-2015, a
committee that promotes comparative ethnic studies scholarship through an annual essay
award. If elected to the Nominating Committee, I would help to ensure that the ASA
continues to be guided by a committed leadership that fearlessly and forcefully engages
in public debates around issues of academic freedom, opposition to the occupation of
Palestine, the adjunctification of higher ed, and the rise of the neoliberal university
among other issues that impact the work we do and the working conditions we face in our
home institutions. I look forward to promoting a diverse leadership that represents the
ASA’s membership as well as its mission and aspirations.
RAMÓN H. RIVERA-SERVERA: Associate Professor and Chair, Department of
Performance Studies, Northwestern University. Education: BA, Art History, University
of Rochester (1996); MA, Theatre Studies, City University of New York (1999); Ph.D.,
Performance as Public Practice, the University of Texas at Austin (2004). Selected
publications: Author, Performing Queer Latinidad: Dance, Sexuality, Politics (U of
Michigan P, 2012), Lambda Literary Award in LGBT Studies; Best Book Award in
Latino Studies - Latin American Studies Association; Outstanding Publication Award Congress on Research in Dance; Special Citation, de la Torre Bueno Book Prize in Dance
Studies, Society of Dance History Scholars; Honorable Mention, Best Book Award,
American Association of Latina and Latino Anthropologists, American Anthropological
Association. Co-editor, solo/black/woman: scripts, interviews, and essays (Northwestern
UP, 2013), Errol Hill Award for Outstanding Scholarship in African-American Theatre
Studies, American Society for Theatre Research. Co-editor, Festival Latino: Six Plays
from the Goodman Theatre Festival (Northwestern UP, 2013). Co-editor, Performance in
the Borderlands (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2011). Service history: Programming Committee,
Modern Languages Association; Council Member, Hemispheric Institute of Performance
and Politics; Executive Committee, American Society for Theatre Research; Board of
Directors, Society of Dance History Scholars; Editorial Board, Studies in Dance History,
U of Wisconsin P; Editorial Board, Theatre Topics; Co-founding officer, Conference
Planner, and Focus Group Representative, Latina/o and Latin American Performance
Focus Group, Association for Theatre in Higher Education.
STATEMENT: I am a lifetime member of the ASA and honored to stand for election to
the Nominating Committee. I am committed to an American Studies that is transnational
in its focus, invested in advancing an academic discipline deeply engaged with the world,
and critical of the politico-economic frameworks that govern historical as well as
contemporary degradations and attacks on life, especially in communities and territories
most devastated by a history American empire. The ASA has honored these
commitments and become a leader among scholarly organizations not only in our
engagement with difficult, pressing issues but our creative expansion of the “form” of
scholarly exchange and the “field” of academic action. In order to sustain an ASA that is
as critical as it is creative, the Nominating Committee is tasked with securing the
volunteer service of our colleagues. I am invested in ensuring that we continue to recruit
an interdisciplinary group of exemplary members of the profession to lead our various
functions and operations as an organization. I am especially committed to seeing our
engagements with Critical Race and Ethnicity Studies, Feminist, Gender and Sexuality
Studies, and hemispheric and global approaches to American Studies continue to thrive
and transform our discipline. As a scholar in Performance Studies, I am also invested in
seeing our incursion into alternative and artistic forms of scholarly production and
presentation continue to expand.