Introducing the 2017 cohort of Mellon Public Scholars! The ten members of this year’s cohort represent nine departments and programs, and their interests address issues and problems in education, environmental justice, gentrification, access to the arts, and citizenship. They will be refining their projects and forging relationships with community organizations during the spring Public Scholars Seminar. Check in at our blog to see how these projects take shape.
Below is a list of our current scholars and their faculty mentors:
Alana Haynes-Stein (Sociology), Yolo Food Bank: Barriers to Access
Catherine Brinkley (Community and Regional Development), Public health in relation to food access and environmental planning
Jeanelle Hope (Cultural Studies), CA Department of Education: Ethnic Studies Curriculum
Robyn Rodriguez (Asian American Studies), Project director of the Welga Digital Archive, collaborating on a K-12 curriculum highlighting Filipino Americans’ contributions to the farmworker movement
Deepa Mahadevan (Performance Studies), Cal Arts Council: Program Evaluation
Lynette Hunter (Rhetoric and Performance), Theoretical implications of situated and performance textualities; working with immigrant communities on Traditional Asian performance
Jennifer Tinonga-Valle (English), California Humanities: Mapping the Field
Gregory Downs (History), Digital site “Mapping Occupation”; integrating Reconstruction history into the National Park Service
Brittani Orona (Native American Studies), Oak Park Neighborhood Association: Digital Storytelling and Mapping Tool
Beth Rose Middleton (Native American Studies), Indigenous land rights and hydroelectric development; protection of culturally important places
Mayra Sanchez (Human Ecology), Digital Storytelling: Stories of Disability and Environmental Justice in Salinas Valley
Julie Sze (American Studies), Environmental inequalities, social movements and policy implementation public and environmental humanities.
Genesis Lara (History), A Dream Not Deferred
Lorena Oropeza (History), 1960s U.S. social protest, settler colonialism, oral history
David Tenorio (Spanish and Portuguese), TransCuba: Transgender Studies in Post-Soviet Cuba
Marcia Ochoa (Feminist Studies, Critcal Race and Ethnic Studies), Programing and social justice work with El/La Para TransLatinas in the Mission District of San Francisco, CA that reflects the style and grace of translatina survival
Roy Taggueg (Sociology), Living on the Edge: Healthcare Empowerment Among Undocumented Asian Americans
Natalia Deeb-Sossa (Chicana/Chicano Studies), Resistance and power negotiation among Mexican immigrant farm worker mothers to educational and health inequity in their local context
Crystal Richardson (Linguistics), Culturally Responsive Karuk Language Curriculum Development
Justin Spence (Native American Studies), Native American languages (especially Pacific Coast Athabaskan languages), language documentation, and historical linguistics
We are also proud to be joined by five UC Public Scholars, selected by their own campus humanities centers/institutes. Their participation is made possible through the efforts of their respective campuses.
Grace Kuipers(UC-Berkeley – Art History), Bauhaus Legacy: A Public History of Pond Farm Pottery
Lauren Kroiz (History of Art), Relationships among regionalism, nationalism and globalism in photography and new media
Carly Maris (UC-Riverside – Ancient History), Helping to Preserve Syrian Heritage: Greek and Latin Inscriptions of Ancient Palmyra
Michele Salzman (History), The city of Rome and its response to crises in late Antiquity
Leopoldo Peña (UC-Irvine – Spanish and Portuguese), Laguna Art Museum
Viviane Mahiuex (Spanish and Portuguese), Modern and contemporary Latin American literature
Andrew Hedding (UC-Santa Cruz – Linguistics), Documenting the narratives and songs of the Mixe peopl
Pranav Anand (Linguistics), Computational modeling of high-level discourse plans, especially those involved in argumentation and persuasion
Jason Ostrove (UC-Santa Cruz – Linguistics), Documenting and Recording the Mixtec Language of San Martín Pera
Maziar Toosarvandani (Linguistics), Syntax and semantics-pragmatics in Northern Paiute and Persian (Farsi)