BOARD OF DIRECTORS
Members of the Board of Directors serve staggered four-year terms, except for the graduate student representative, who serves a two-year term. Board members must attend two meetings a year: one at the annual conference in the Spring and one in the Fort Collins/Denver area in the Fall. Executive Committee members may also be required to meet during the summer. Between meetings, each Board member is expected to serve on committees and to further the business of NAES in other ways. NAES is able to cover nominal travel expenses for meetings, therefore Board members should try to secure funding from their home institutions or pay their own way. Candidates for the Board must have been NAES members for at least one year prior to serving.
Elections to the Board occur as terms end. We encourage anyone interested in serving to self-nominate or recommend others to the chair of the Nominations Committee.
Serving on an NAES standing committee is excellent preparation for Board service, and offers a significant way to serve the organization. Nearly all of the standing committees need non-Board members to contribute. To inquire about serving on an NAES committee, please contact the chair of the committee in which you are interested. You can find that information on the NAES Committees page.
Members of the Board of Directors (terms end at the annual conference in the year indicated in parentheses):
NAES History | Board of Directors | Committees | Membership |
David Aliano is an Assistant Professor of Modern Languages and Literatures and History at the College of Mount Saint Vincent. He earned his Ph.D. and M. Phil. Degrees at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY) and his Bachelor of the Arts Degree at Fordham University.
David specializes in the study of transnational and migrant identities. Living and working in the immigrant communities of New York City has made him especially aware of the importance of ethnic studies as an integral part of college curricula. At the College of Mount Saint Vincent he offers a wide range of courses in Italian and Spanish as well as European and Latin American History. He has developed new courses and programs related to ethnic and international studies, including a Study Abroad program to Rome, Italy. He also has experience in community outreach having worked for the Ecuadorian Civic Committee of New York as well as the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute, Queens College (CUNY).
Publications include, “Brazil through Italian Eyes: The Debate over Emigration to São Paulo during the 1920s,” in Altreitalie (2005); “Curing the Ills of Central America: The United Fruit Company Medical Department and Corporate America’s Mission to Civilize,” in Estudios Interdisciplinarios de America Latina y el Caribe (2006); “Revisiting Saint Domingue: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the Haitian Revolution in the French Colonial Debates of the Late Nineteenth Century (1870-1900),” in French Colonial History (2008); and most recently, “Citizenship and Belonging: The Case of the Italian Vote Abroad” in the Ethnic Studies Review (2010).
Dr. Diane Ariza is Associate VP for Academic Affairs & Chief Diversity Officer at Quinnipiac University. Previously, she was an Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies at Albion College in Michigan where she helped to develop an Ethnic Studies Program which includes collaborating with faculty, students and staff to establish interdisciplinary courses, internships, research projects, and co-curricular events that foster a deeper understanding and study of race and ethnicity and both the domestic and international levels.
In addition to her full time teaching and research responsibilities, she also is committed to developing relationships with organizations whose work strengthens multicultural and multicultural relationships locally, regionally, nationally, and globally. Her teaching and research interests include immigrant studies, gender inequity, youth identity and migration, particularly with second generation immigrants in the U.S. and other countries, including Canada, Europe, and Latin America, to name a few.
She is currently working on several papers that address second generation Latina/o issues including their identity, migration and their adaptation to Central Florida.
She has presented at several NAES Annual Conferences and cherishes the mentorship and collegial spirit that she has received thus far from its members. One of her roles in NAES is to promote and mentor more undergraduate and graduate students to be a part of this rigorous, intellectual and caring community.
Published Work: Latino/a Youth Identity and Adaptation: A Socio-Cultural Comparison of Mexican and Mexican American Students at a Predominantly White Campus, LAP Lambert Academic Publishing (2009)
Susan M. Asai is an associate professor in the Music Department at Northeastern University in Boston. She received her Ph.D. in ethnomusicology from the University of California at Los Angeles. Her primary areas of interest and research are Asian American music, particularly issues of music and identity, and Japanese folk performing arts.
The range of topics she has researched and written about includes Japanese folk performing arts, Asian American music and identity, and pedagogies in teaching Asian music. Asai's key publications include her book, "Nomai Dance Drama: A Surviving Spirit of Medieval Japan," published in November 1999 by Greenwood Publishing Group, and the articles, "Transformations of Tradition: Three Generations of Japanese American Music Making," "Sansei Voices in the Community: Japanese American Musicians in California," and "Origins of the Musical and Spiritual Syncretism in Nomai Dance Drama of Northern Japan."
Her current book project investigates the nexus of music, identity, and politics in the music making of three generations of Japanese Americans. Other research and teaching interests include cultural politics, globalization and popular musics of the world, and music and dance of the African Diaspora.
Her courses include: "Music as a Means of Social Expression", "Music of Asia", "Music of Latin America and the Caribbean", and "Historical Traditions: World Music".
Brian Baker is an Associate Professor of Native American Studies and Ethnic Studies at California State University, Sacramento. He is annishinabe (Chippewa/Ojibway) from the Bad River Reservation located on the Lake Superior shoreline in northern Wisconsin.
Dr. Baker holds a B.S. degree in Sociology, Political Science, and Native American Studies from Northland College; an M.A. in Sociology from Central Michigan University; and PhD from Stanford University.
His dissertation, A Nation in Two States, contrasted differences in the articulation of treaty-based fishing rights and traditional modes of fishing for the Lake Superior Chippewa in the United States and Canada and was supported by a Fulbright Scholarship and a Danforth Compton Fellowship.
One of Dr. Baker’s projects involved a critical examination of American Indian images and stereotypes. He conceptualized and curated an exhibit titled The Americana Indian, and which was shown at California State University, Sacramento; Stanford University; Central Michigan University; and the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Ultimately, the goal is to transform The Americana Indian into a traveling show with larger plans of creating a museum.
He is currently working on an article that highlights connections between the artifacts and the lived experiences of American Indians in the U.S.
Kasturi DasGupta completed her undergraduate work in Economics at Indraprastha College in Delhi University in 1970. She received her Master's from Southern University in 1974 and PhD in Sociology from Louisiana State University in 1979.
Since 1989 Kasturi has taught at Georgian Court University - founded in 1908 by the Sisters of Mercy in Lakewood, New Jersey - where today she is Professor of Sociology.
At Georgian Court University, Kasturi served ten years as department Chair and was instrumental in starting the University's Service Learning program. In May 2006 she received the Georgian Court University's President's Award for Teaching Excellence. Her teaching and scholarship are deeply rooted in the values and principles of a "public sociology," which believes that as a science of society sociology's role is not just to understand the barriers that stand in the way of realizing social justice, but also to commit itself to removing them.
Kasturi's practice of a "public sociology" starts in the classroom, where she regularly integrates the core values of the Mercy Sisters justice, integrity, respect, service, and compassion into the discussions of poverty, homelessness, immigration, racism, globalization, militarization, war. It continues outside the classroom when she takes students to the US-Mexico Border in El Paso and Juarez to see firsthand the realities of globalization and immigration as they are lived out in people's lives.
In the last fifteen years Kasturi has presented numerous papers at professional gatherings, has published extensively and has spoken at conferences and universities as keynote and guest speaker. Having presented papers almost every year at the Annual Conferences of the NAES since 1993, her proudest moment came when she was invited to deliver the Keynote Address at the 30th Annual Conference of the NAES at Vancouver, British Columbia on April 4th 2004.
She has traveled to India, Mexico, Kenya, Tanzania, South Africa, Cuba and El Salvador. For her sabbatical in 2006-07 she spent six months in Bolivia, at a time when that country was making headlines for electing the hemisphere's first indigenous president.
At present she is working on a manuscript based on her experiences in Bolivia and is also completing a book about her parents who were freedom fighters and pioneering journalists which her sole sibling, her younger sister had started until her premature death just last July.
Dr. Emily Drew is an Associate Professor of American Ethnic Studies at Willamette University, where she teaches courses about racism, urban sociology, mass media, and social change.
Her research and teaching are driven by a life-long commitment to equity and social justice. As an educator, she practices critical pedagogy in methodology and content and her Ethnic Studies students engage in academic “justice learning,” where they help contribute to building the capacity of organizations working for immigration justice in Oregon.
Dr. Drew’s research agenda revolves around understanding how race and racism operate inside of social institutions, with the goal of helping to illuminate more effective strategies for interrupting institutionalized racism. Her research has been published in Critical Studies in Media Communication and the Journal of Tourism & Cultural Change. She has a forthcoming work in the Journal of Urban Affairs that explores how a neighborhood in Portland, Oregon responds to gentrification by producing local knowledge claims, raising consciousness and attempting to build “anti-racist place.”
As an anti-racist activist for almost 20 years, Dr. Drew has also served as a co-trainer of “Understanding Institutional Racism” workshops for Crossroads Anti-Racism Organizing and Training.
In higher education, she works as a strategic planner, helping institutions develop and implement long term commitments to anti-racist, multicultural diversity.
Recently, Dr. Drew was selected by Oregon Humanities to facilitate a conversation about race and place with non-profits across the state entitled “White Out: The Future of Racial Diversity in Oregon.”
Connie A. Jacobs is a Professor Emeritus at San Juan College, Farmington, New Mexico where she served at Chair of the English Department. Additionally, she co-directed and helped build the college's Honors Program.
Her teaching focused on Ethnic Literatures, and she specialized in American Indian Literatures, especially the work of Diné poets Luci Tapahonso and Esther Belin and Ojibwe writer, Louise Erdrich. Her books include The Novels of Louise Erdrich: Stories of Her People ([American Indian Studies, V. 11.] Peter Lang Publishing (2001) and Approaches to Teaching the Works of Louise Erdrich, co-edited with Greg Sarris and published by MLA.
She currently serves on MLA's Committee for Two-Year Colleges as well as on the board of her local Adult Education Center. She is beginning her 3rd term on the NAES Board of Directors. She has been program director for two conferences, Vancouver and Philadelphia, and now serves on the Conference Planning Committee along with chairing the Student Paper Competitions. She is in her second term as secretary of the Executive Board of NAES.
Dr. Ravi Perry is Assistant Professor of Political Science and Director of Race and Ethnic Relations at Clark University (Worcester, MA).
Dr. Perry holds a B.A. from the University of Michigan and a M.A. and Ph.D. from Brown University, each in political science.
Perry is a young scholar with an evolving and prolific take on issues facing African-Americans in the United States. With specializations in Black politics, minority representation, and urban politics, Dr. Perry’s teaching interests include African-American politics, urban and local politics, race and representation, American politics and public policy and contemporary political theory.
His current research foci include: the representation of Black interests and public policy service delivery of African American mayors in medium-sized U.S. cities, and the intertwined relationship between scholarship and activism for social science scholars. He is currently researching the representation of Black interests in the state of Ohio by Black mayors who govern cities where their minority constituents do not constitute a numerical majority.
He is also editor of a volume in preparation that examines minority mayors’ efforts to represent minority interests in historically Caucasian cities nationwide. His commentary, op-eds, editorials and award-winning oratory have been featured in varied media outlets across the country.
Raúl Rubio is Associate Professor of Foreign Languages and Literature at John Jay College of Criminal Justice of the City University of New York.
A Hispanist and cultural studies scholar, Rubio, specializes in Cuban and Cuban-American literature, cinema, and popular culture. His research is grounded in the emerging interdisciplinary field of material culture, which examines a wide-range of artifacts, from cultural commodities to the museum archive.
Professor Rubio received a doctorate in Latin American Literature and Cultural Studies from Tulane University in New Orleans and earned a Master’s degree in Spanish from Middlebury College of Vermont. He completed his undergraduate degree at Barry University in Miami Shores, Florida.
Professor Rubio’s publications have appeared in numerous academic journals, including: Studies in Latin American Popular Culture (U. of Texas Press), Letras Hispanas, CiberLetras, Espéculo: revista de estudios literarios (Spain), Caribe: revista de literatura y cultura, and in the book Cuba: Idea of a Nation Displaced (SUNY Press).
He recently completed an article on the meanings and metaphors of cannibalism in Latin American literature as symbolic of ethnic integration and social justice that will appear in the journal Chasqui. Rubio is completing a monograph titled Imagining Havana: Cuban and Cuban-American Interludes and is involved in other research projects, including a theoretical piece on ethnic humor, specifically in the stand-up comedy genre and a second book project titled Havana and the Aesthetics of Revolution.
Professor Rubio currently serves on the Board of Directors of the National Association for Ethnic Studies and is a Fellow of the Cuba Project at the Bildner Center for Western Hemisphere Studies of the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY).
He has lectured widely on Cuba and Cuban-Americans and has been an evaluator and reviewer for academic journals and publishing presses, including: MELUS, Portal: Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies (Australia), Hispanic Review, Revista de crítica literaria latinoamericana, Latino Studies, and Rutgers University Press.
Dr. Carleen D. Sanchez is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Austin Community College.
She did her undergraduate studies in Political Science at California State University Fullerton; her M.A. and Ph.D. are in Anthropology from the University of California Santa Barbara. Her dissertation was supported with a Fulbright-Hays Scholarship and focused on Ancient Maya political organization. Her areas of research include Ancestral Mesoamerica, contemporary Latino/Latin American popular culture, and comparative Ethnic Studies.
In 2005 she was selected as a Mellon Fellow to participate in the Future of Minority Studies seminar on transnational feminisms led by Chandra Mohanty and Beverly Guy-Sheftall.
Dr. Sanchez has worked with Latino and community organizations for the past 30 years, having begun as a student activist during the 1980s working with Central American refugees in Los Angeles. She assisted in the establishment of the first Central American Studies Program at California State University Northridge.
Her work has been published in the Journal of Virtual Worlds Research; Mexicon: Journal of Mesoamerican Studies; The Oxford Companion to Archaeology; Practicing Anthropology; Istmo: Revista virtual de estudios literarios y culturales centroamericano; Estudios Culturales Centroamericanos en el nuevo milenio (Costa Rica); Cultura (El Salvador); Yaxkin (Honduras), as well as contributions on Aztec deities to the Encyclopedia of Latino Folklore (forthcoming).
Ron Scapp is the founding director of the Graduate Program in Urban and Multicultural Education at the College of Mount Saint Vincent in the Bronx, where he is professor of humanities and teacher education. He is a fellow of the Education Policy Studies Laboratory at Arizona State University.
Ron's work focuses on urban education, educational leadership and policy and teacher empowerment. He also writes on topics as varied as homelessness, American theater and contemporary continental philosophy.
He is the author, editor and co-editor of a number of books and other publications, including Teaching Values: Critical Perspectives on Education, Politics and Culture (Routledge. 2003. ISBN 0-415-93106-1), Fashion Statements: On Style, Appearance, and Reality, Palgrave Macmillan ISBN 978-0230105423
He has a Ph.D. in philosophy and is a member of Group Thought, a philosophy collective based in Red Hook, Brooklyn.
Irene S. Vernon is a Professor/Chair of the Ethnic Studies Department and the Assistant to the Dean in the College of Liberal Arts at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, Colorado.
She is the author of numerous articles, book chapters and monographs on Native Americans and HIV/AIDS, health disparities, trauma, social issues, and post-colonialism. Her Killing Us Quietly: Native Americans and HIV/AIDS (University of Nebraska Press: 2001, ISBN 978-0803246683) is the first book published on HIV/AIDS and Native Americans.
She is an affiliated member of the National Ethnic Studies Association, National Minority AIDS Council, National Institute of Health Ad Hoc Committee, Colorado Public Health Association, and Colorado Minority Health Coalition.
She regularly conducts Ethnic Studies Program reviews and is a manuscript reviewer for the University of Nebraska Press, Oklahoma University Press, American Indian Culture and Research Journal, Wicazo Sa Review, and English Journal.
She has been a Co-PI on a number of grants that aim at community development and technical assistance for tribes. Her current research interests have expanded beyond HIV/AIDS to include trauma literature.
Dr. Vernon's extensive administrative skills as Co-Principal Investigator, Director, Chair, Associate/Assistant Dean and Provost of Special Projects have resulted in expertise in budget, leadership, strategic planning, management, assessment/evaluation, program review, recruitment, and fundraising.
She was one of the first Ethnic Studies Ph.D. graduates and successfully moved the Center for Applied Studies in American Ethnicity (created in 1994) to the Department of Ethnic Studies in 2008.
Dr. Vernon received a B.A. in Native American Studies from the University of California, Berkeley, M.A. in United States History (emphasis in Native American History) from the University of New Mexico, and a Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies from the University of California, Berkeley.
NAES History | Board of Directors | Committees | Membership |