For immediate release:

Cal State L.A. Announces Four
New Humanities Fellows-in-Residence

Cal State L.A. Rockefeller Humanities Residency Program recently selected two Cal State L.A. Fellows and two Visiting Fellows whose work will advance the given year’s theme, “The Hybrid Family.” The Residency Program aims to investigate the multiple discourses of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, religion, tradition, labor, and family as they intersect and create new notions of “Americanness.”

Cal State L.A. Fellows:
Ester Hernandez (Santa Ana resident), assistant professor of Chicano Studies at Cal State L.A., received her Ph.D. in Social Science in 2002 from UC Irvine. She received the UC President’s Dissertation Fellowship in 1999. As a fellow-in-residence, she will continue a project on the Salvadoran Diaspora. Her work examines changing gender relations, family structures, identities and sense of belonging among Salvadoran immigrants in Metropolitan Los Angeles. The study will focus on the efforts that community organizations are making to connect second generation Salvadorans to their family and community histories.

Mark Wild (Los Angeles resident), assistant professor of history at Cal State L.A., received his Ph.D. from UC San Diego. His first book, Rumored Congregation: Confronting the Multiethnic Neighborhoods of Early Twentieth Century Los Angeles, will be published in 2004. His articles have appeared in Journal of Urban History, Southern California Quarterly, and forthcoming in Immigrant Life in the U.S.: Multidisciplinary Perspectives. As a fellow-in-residence, Wild will explore churches and schools that addressed the social conflicts of the 1960s-1980s.

Visiting Fellows:
Harry Gamboa, Jr. (Los Angeles resident) creates multi-media works that document and interpret the contemporary urban Chicano experience. He has produced numerous video works and conceptual drama, and is the author of Urban Exile: Collected Writings of Harry Gamboa Jr. His work has been exhibited worldwide, including in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC; Museum of Modern Art, New York; and Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City. As a fellow-in-residence, Gamboa Jr. will develop the video work, L.A. Familia 2, and produce new photographic and text works that examine family dynamics of contemporary Los Angeles.

Jeanne Theoharis (Silver Lake resident) is an assistant professor of political science at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York. She received her A.B. in Afro-American Studies at Harvard University and her Ph.D. in American Culture from the University of Michigan. She has written several articles on the politics of race in America, coauthored These Yet To Be United States: Civil Rights and Civil Liberties in America Since 1945 and co-edited Freedom North: Black Freedom Struggles Outside the South. As a fellow-in-residence, Theoharis will look at the ways a group of black high school students in Los Angeles write about themselves, their communities, and their history in the context of studying black history.

The Rockefeller Humanities Residency Program: The prestigious Rockefeller Foundation grant of $325,000 spans three years and complements the American Communities program. Each year, under the auspices of this grant, two visiting research fellows will join two Cal State L.A. faculty fellows, also selected annually, to work on interdisciplinary humanities projects. The Rockefeller Humanities Grant will expand the understanding of three facets of contemporary American multicultural experience—the changing nature of the family, the challenge of fundamentalism, and the increasingly complex interplay of gender and work. The Cal State L.A. Rockefeller proposal receives an added dimension from Cal State L.A.’s new Center for the Study of Genders and Sexualities. Faculty scholars in this Center will address identity issues that have a gender component.

California State University, Los Angeles, is a comprehensive university at the heart of a major metropolitan city. The 175-acre hilltop campus is located five miles east of Los Angeles’ civic and cultural center. Since 1947, Cal State L.A. has been a leader in providing quality higher education. Today, the campus comprises a faculty of internationally recognized scholars and artists, and more than 21,000 students with a wide variety of interests, ages and backgrounds that reflect the city’s dynamic mix of populations. The CSU: A leader in high-quality, accessible, student-focused higher education.

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