Karen Umemoto, Interim Editor
Karen Umemoto is the Helen and Morgan Chu Endowed Director’s Chair of the UCLA Asian American Studies Center. She is currently a professor of Urban Planning at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs and of Asian American Studies.
Professor Umemoto’s research centers on issues of democracy and social justice in multicultural societies with a focus on US cities. She also examines and pursues planning processes that include a diverse array of voices, acknowledges different ways of knowing, and allows for meaningful deliberations. She is equally concerned about the structural, procedural and relational obstacles to attaining a just and democratic society. Her research and practice thus takes a broad view of planning in the context of social inclusion, participatory democracy and political transformation.
She holds a PhD in Urban Studies from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an MA in Asian American Studies from UCLA.
Arnold Pan, Associate Editor
Arnold Pan is Associate Editor of Amerasia Journal. Arnold holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Irvine, and attended Stanford University as an undergraduate. In addition to Asian American Studies, Arnold’s areas of academic expertise are ethnic literature and U.S. modernism. Arnold has published an essay entitled “Transnationalism at the Impasse of Race: Sui Sin Far and U.S. Imperialism” in Arizona Quarterly (2010), as well as book reviews in Amerasia, Genre, and Modern Fiction Studies. He has an extensive background teaching Asian American Studies, American literature, and writing, having worked at UC Irvine and Loyola Marymount University.
Arnold writes about his experiences in academia at the blog he co-created, Post Academic. He is also a music critic and a member of the editorial staff of PopMatters.
Russell Leong, Contributing Editor
Russell C. Leong is the senior editor at-large for international projects for the UCLA Asian American Studies Center. Between 1977-2010, he served as the editor of Amerasia Journal, the flagship scholarly journal in the field of Asian American American Studies. He edited the first anthologies on Asian American visual media film arts, and on Asian American sexuality. He also directs the U.S./China Media Brief.
An award-winning writer, Leong has been honored with the PEN Josephine Miles Award for Literature for his book of poetry, The Country of Dreams and Dust. His book Phoenix Eyes and Other Stories won the American Book Award and was selected by the Los Angeles Times as one of the 100 best books of fiction internationally for 2000. He was one of fifty U.S. poets in the five-part PBS and book series, The United States of Poetry, and his work has been translated in Mainland China and Taiwan. In Spring 2011, Leong taught at Hunter College, as the first co-recipient of the Dr. Thomas Tam Fellowship.
Leong heads the new Literary E-Book Series at UCLA, which will publish new and neglected Asian and Pacific American writers.
Former Staff
Judy Tzu-Chun Wu
Keith L. Camacho
Barbra Ramos
Mary Uyematsu Kao
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