Who We Are

Project Directors

Summer Institute Faculty

Colloquium Speakers

Summer Institute Participants

  • Christa Baiada is an Associate Professor of English with specialization in post-war American Fiction and Comparative Ethnic American Literatures. She teaches writing and literature courses, including regularly teaching Asian American Literature as well as Latino/a Literature and Italian American Literature. Currently her scholarship focuses on representations of mothering, and breastfeeding in particular, in contemporary American fiction.
  • Anita Baksh is Assistant Professor of English at LaGuardia Community College. Her teaching and publications focus on Caribbean literature, South Asian diasporic literatures, postcolonial theory, feminist theory, and composition. Her essays on Indo-Caribbean women’s writing have been published in Bindi: The Multifaceted Lives of Indo-Caribbean Women (2011), Defying the Global Language: Perspectives in Ethnic Studies (2013) and online in sx salon: A Small Axe Literary Platform. Her current research examines how Indo-Caribbean writers utilize indentureship as a way to understand the history of colonial domination and to negotiate dominant models of postcolonial Caribbean citizenship.
  • Trikartikaningsih Byas, Ph.D. is Associate Professor of English at Queensborough Community College. She often includes immigrant experience, especially Indonesian Americans; technology, including e-Portfolio; and multi-modality in her Composition classes. Her work on the Indonesian diaspora’s religious and artistic experiences has appeared in publications such as Contemporary Issues in Southeast Asian American studies (Lee & Chung, 2010), Across Cultures (Gillespie & Becker, 2011), Encyclopedia of Asian American Folklore and Folklife (Lee & Nadeau, 2011), and Asian American Religious Cultures (Lee, Matsuoka, Yee & Nakasone,2015).
  • Prithi Kanakameda is an Assistant Professor of History at BCC. Her interests include the material culture of the Black Atlantic, nineteenth century free Black communities in New York, and the History of New York City. The exhibit Brooklyn Abolitionists, her most recent work as a public historian, can currently be seen at the Brooklyn History Society.
  • Jungah Kim received her Ph.D. from Columbia University and joined the faculty of BMCC in 2012. She taught honors courses at the University of Massachusetts Boston, where she was a postdoctoral research fellow. She studied Asian American and comparative ethnic literary studies, postcolonial, transnational, and global literature and theory, and teaching of literature. Her current research and teaching interests are global histories of economic and racial subjection and the topic of Asian diaspora manifested in literature, film, and pop culture.
  • Rose M. Kim is an associate professor of sociology at the Borough of Manhattan Community College/CUNY. Prior to graduate school she worked as a reporter at New York Newsday and the Los Angeles Times; and, was part of a team of journalists that won a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the 1992 L.A. riots/insurrection/saigu, an event she re-examined in her dissertation. Her research areas include racialization, mass media discourse and public higher education.
  • Swan Kim is an Assistant Professor of English at Bronx Community College, where shealso serves as the Writing-Across-the-Curriculum Coordinator. She specializes in Asian American and Asian diaspora studies and theories of transnationalism and immigration. She has received her Ph.D. in English from University of Virginia and has also taught at Rutgers University at New Brunswick and New York Institute of Technology.
  • Catherine Ma: My name is Cathy and I’m an assistant professor of psychology at Kingsborough Community College. I am an avid researcher in breastfeeding ideology and am utilizing women’s lived experiences to create a new model of breastfeeding that is empowering and women-centered. I am also using my experiences as a first generation college student and Chinese immigrant to expand my research expertise in immigration and developing a course on the psychology of immigration that will study the lived experiences of our immigrant students.
  • Arianna Martinez is an Associate Professor of Urban Studies at LaGuardia Community College. She received her PhD from Rutgers University in urban planning and geography. She has analyzed the criminalization of Latino immigrant communities in municipalities where both space and citizenship are hotly contested. Martinez’s current scholarship focuses on the urban transformation and empowerment of multi-ethnic communities, and LGBTQ immigrant enclaves. She is happy to call Queens her home.
  • Devin Molina is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Bronx Community College where he teaches Introductory courses in Anthropology and Sociology and upper level sociology courses in Social Inequality, Race and Ethnic Relations, and The Sociology of Gender. His research is on anti-immigrant social movements, border security, and the maintenance of white supremacy in the United States.
  • Dr. Tomonori Nagano is an Associate Professor of Japanese and Linguistics at LaGuardia Community College. He is also a coordinator of the Modern Langauges and Literatures Program and serves as the program director for the Liberal Arts Japanese Option. He received his Ph.D. and M.Phil. in Linguistics from the CUNY Graduate Center and his MA in TESOL from New York University.
  • Khushmand Rajendran earned her Ph.D. from the University at Albany, Albany, NY. Her dissertation which won the Distinguished Dissertation award was about Resilience factors such as parenting style and child future orientation among children in the US child welfare system. She has a number of publications on the impact of pre- and postnatal trauma on children’s behavior problems, on parenting and neuropsychological functioning and its association with ADHD in children and on service use among children in child welfare. She recently got the PSC-cuny grant to study the impact of service use among children with ADHD.
    These are some of her publications:
    http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/myncbi/18AwOzhTp8Rks/bibliography/48005158/public/?sort=date&direction=ascending
  • Aleah N. Ranjitsingh, Ph.D. is an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the fields of Women and Gender Studies, Africana Studies and Caribbean Studies. Her research focuses on: gender and development, masculinity studies, mixed-race studies, political economy and gender and sexuality. She is currently co-authoring a book which looks at race, ethnicity and mixedness in the Caribbean and the Caribbean diaspora.
  • Joy Sanchez-Taylor is an Assistant Professor of English at LaGuardia Community College (CUNY) whose research specialty is multi-ethnic speculative fiction. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of South Florida in 2014. She has published articles in Science Fiction Studies, The Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, and Extrapolation. Currently, she is working on a monograph examining the contributions of authors of U.S. ethnic speculative fiction to the genre.​
  • Lili Shi: a transnational feminist scholar, teacher, and mother. Born and raised Yi in Southwest China’s Yunnan Province, I came to the United States in 2004 to study culture, gender, and communication. I now teach intercultural communication at Kingsborough Community College and do research on Brooklyn Chinatown mothers’ diasporic gender identities in lived experiences of transnational maternity.
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