Graduate Students

Nanao Akanuma (nanaoaat uci dot edu)
Admitted in 2003. Nanao completed her undergraduate studies in English Literature and Linguistics at Meiji Gakuin University in Japan. She majored in Anthropology at University of California at Irvine as an international exchange undergraduate student participating in the Education Abroad Program 2001-2002. During this time, Nanao focused mainly on how issues of modernity and ethnicity correlated with discourses of art and culture in the context of globalization and transnationalism.

The present subject of her research is sumo wrestling in Japan. She studies sumo as a reflection of changing power relations in the Asia-Pacific region. In particular, she is interested in the political and economic implications of this "national sport," particularly how post-Cold War geopolitics relates with the rise of translocal popular culture. The theoretical issues that she addresses in her project include: the ultural politics of globalization, Japanese popular culture and capitalism, sport and the cultural construction of space, discourses of nationalism and transnationalism in the Asia-Pacific region (particularly Mongolia and Japan), and gender.

Preliminary fieldwork in Japan was funded by the School of Social Sciences and the Department of Anthropology at University of California, Irvine in summers 2004 and 2005. She is currently conducting dissertation research in Japan with the support of the Pacifc Rim Research Program and the Center for Asian Studies.

Janet Alexanian (janeta uci dot edu)
Admitted in 2003. Research interests include Iranian immigration, community and identification. Alexanian has received a Regents' Fellowship (2003, 2004), Pre-dissertation Research Award (2004), and funding for field research in the United States and France from the School of Social Sciences and Department of Anthropology (2004, 2005). Forthcoming publication, "Publicly Intimate Online: Iranian Weblogs in Southern California" is forthcoming in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East.

Asya Anderson (asyaa uci dot edu)
Admitted in 2004. Asya received her B.A. in Anthropology from Vassar College. She is interested in cultural contact and exchange, especially regarding the power dynamics of the dominant and dominated in colonial, postcolonial, and globalizing contexts. In this vein, Asya is studying the francophone Caribbean, particularly Haiti and Martinique and the unique gender and racial ideologies which have come out of their respective colonial histories. Recently, she has also become interested in American and European expatriate groups residing in Southeast Asia and the ways in which these groups subtly replicate nineteenth century colonial society.

Rebecca Andersson (anderssr uci dot edu)
Admitted in 2003 with a Social Science Resident Fellowship and University of California Regents Fellowship. Before entering the Ph.D. program at UCI, Rebecca earned a dual B.A. in Anthropology and Art History from California State University Long Beach, where she was a CSU Sally Casanova Pre-doctoral Fellow (2002-2003). Her research has been supported by the School of Social Sciences (2004), and the Department of Anthropology (2004, 2005). She is interested in the production of public culture and space, issues of representation (textual and visual), museums and public art, anthropology of media, with an area focus on Israel/Palestine, and the cultural construction of the "Arab Jew."

Andrea Ballestero (aballes at uci dot edu)
Andrea was admitted in 2005. Andrea was trained as a lawyer and worked for seven years as an instructor and project manager at the University for International Cooperation in Costa Rica. She came to the US on a Fulbright Fellowship to pursue a Masters in Environmental Policy from the University of Michigan (2004). She is currently conducting fieldwork for her dissertation which focuses on the production and transformation of the "value" of water in Costa Rica, Brazil and Sweden. In particular, she is interested in how commodities, human rights and nature are (re)produced and articulated into governance projects that embrace notions of experimentation, inclusion, and the global. To examine this process she is studying the apparent decentralization of "expertise" in an era in which politics, development, and reform tend to proclaim that all forms of knowledge and desire count. Also she is analyzing the politics of the production, negotiation and usage of legal and technoscientific tools (e.g. water rights, hydrological models, legal concession processes, property rights, pricing methodologies, water budgets) that are connected through transnational collaborative and knowledge sharing political networks. Her research is funded by the Wenner Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the Cultural Anthropology and Law and Social Sciences programs of the National Science Foundation, and UCI's School of Social Sciences, Department of Anthropology, Urban Water Research Center, Center for Global Peace and Conflict Studies, and Center for Unconventional Security Affairs.

Cristina Bejarano (cbejaran at uci dot edu)
Admitted in 2007. Cristina Bejarano completed her MA in applied anthropology with an emphasis in medical anthropology at California State University Long Beach in 2007. Her thesis, entitled "From Compliance to Collaboration: Alternatives for Trainings in Health Care, "addressed the implementation of the cultural competency policy at a southern California hospital. She used the data from her involvement on the hospital’s cultural competency committee, interviews with interpreters and Hispanic parents of children on dialysis, and the results of an employee survey to develop an alternative training curriculum for health care practitioners. She is interested in health disparities among Latinos and Latinas in the U.S.

Joe Blankholm (joe.blankholm at uci dot edu)
Admitted in 2006. Joe received his B.A. in Cultural Studies & Comparative Literature from the University of Minnesota in 2005. His interests include evangelical Christianity, Jehovah's Witnesses, southern Africa, neoliberalism, secular/religious debates, and theories of consumption.

Khaldun Bshara (kbshara at uci dot edu)
Admitted 2007. Khaldum Bsharais a conservation architect and a designer. He has been heading the Conservation Unit in Riwaq-Centre for Architectural Conservation since 1994. He has a BA in Architectural Engineering from Birzeit University, and MA in Conservation of Historic Towns and Buildings from R. Lemaire International Centre for Conservation / Catholic University of Leuven. He carried out many architectural design and architectural conservation projects in Palestine. He is the author and co-author of number of books and articles, including Riwaq's Guidelines for Maintenance and Restoration of Historic Buildings in Palestine (2005), and Ramallah, Architecture and History (2002).

Jennifer Chase (jchase at uci dot edu)
Admitted in 2000. Jennifer Chase is currently writing her dissertation on gay and lesbian Turks in Germany, with support from a James Harvey Fellowship. Her research in Germany was funded by the DAAD, the Department of Anthropology and the Schoo of Social Sciences. She attended San Francisco State's Sexuality, Society and Health Institute. She received a Regents' Predissertation Fellowship (Winter 2003). She also contributed the "Berlin" entry for www.glbtq.com, an online scholarship resource for gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender and queer history and current issues. Her review of Arlene Stein's The Stranger Next Door can be found in the Summer 2003 issue of Anthropological Quarterly.

Yoon S. Choi (yoonsc at uci dot edu)
Admitted in 2004. Yoon completed her undergraduate studies in English Literature from Scripps College. She then went on to pursue an MA in Humanities at NYU, where she focused mainly on globaliztation, media, national image and how they related to contemporary Korean society. Her MA thesis (Riding the Korean Wave: Hanryu and the South Korean Imaginary) was about the current boom of Korean popular culture in different parts of East and Southeast Asia. Also related to the theme of the mediatization of Korean culture and national image, her work on Korea's hosting of the 2002 FIFA World Cup is due to be published as a chapter in Football Goes East, an edited edition by Routledge. She has presented papers regarding both of these topics at annual conferences held by UC Berkeley's Center for Korean Studies. She is currently conducting dissertation research in Korea with the support of the SSRC and the Korea Foundation.

Ariane Dalla Dea (dalladea at uci dot edu)
Admitted in 2000. Anthropology, BA 2000 UCLA, MA 2003, PhD 2008, UCI
As doctoral candidate in Anthropology and recipient of the 2007-2008 University of California Office of the President Dissertation Year Fellowship, I will finish my dissertation Theater Politics, and Culture: constructing citizenship and participation through performance and representation in Brazil, in June 2008. My interest in political theatre and its application in activism and government depart from my own experience with theatre. However, this research came out of an unanticipated encounter with popular theater in my previous anthropological research at UCLA, where I investigated the significance of resistance among immigrant domestic workers in Los Angeles. In this study, I examine the role of experience in transforming and maintaining cultural practices in theater and government at the city of Santo Andre and Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, and in Los Angeles. I served as core board member of the Center for Theater of the Oppressed in Los Angeles and at the Brazil Strategy Network, and I have been involved with the Southern California Brazilian community as translator since 1984, and as journalist eight years. I worked in various research projects in the city of Los Angeles as coordinator and ethnographer, and produced and organized a Brazilian Documentary Film Festival. I am also organizing a special issue entitled Art, Culture, and Politics: Representations of and by Latinos in the Americas for the journal Latin American Perspectives, forthcoming in 2009.

Elsa Fan (fane at uci dot edu)
Admitted in 2007. Elsa Fan is currently a first year graduate student in anthropology. Her research interests center around philanthrocapitalism and knowledge production, the role of civil society (NGOs), and development policy with specific interests in HIV/AIDS in China. Prior to this, she worked with an international grantmaking organization, and spent many years with UNDP in China and Timor-Leste. Elsa also managed social development projects with a grassroots NGO in rural China. She received a bachelor's degree from the University of California at Berkeley in anthropology and psychology and a master's degree in development studies and anthropology from the London School of Economics and Political Science, where she focused on strategies of negotiation between women and the state with regard to the one child policy.

Allison Fish (afish at uci dot edu)
Admitted in 2003. Allison's primary research interests are in the areas of legal anthropology and knowledge production. A question that has directed much of her work to date is How are knowledge systems produced and managed through legal and quasi-legal forms? Her dissertation pursues one key mechanism--intellectual property rights. Specifically, this project addresses the above issues through an exploration through a case study that follows the application of intellectual property claims to yoga and the reactions that such claims have provoked. Her fieldwork is focused in India, but includes research segments in Hong Kong and the United States. In addition to her dissertation research Allison writes for the iCommons group Local Context-Global Commons.

R. Nalika Gajaweera (rgajawee at uci dot edu)
Admitted in 2006. Nalika received her B.A in Anthropology and the Visual Arts from Occidental College in 2004. She received a Richter International Fellowship in 2003 to conduct fieldwork in London to study the British-Asian Underground music subculture in London. In 2005, Nalika was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to conduct research in India studying the socio-cultural issues surrounding the outsourcing of call center work to India and its effects upon the lives of young Indian workers. During this year, Nalika became interested in how this virtual work enables young Indian workers to cultivate certain kinds of global cosmopolitan identities and middle-class consumer desires. Since joining UCI, Nalika has also done pre-dissertation research in Sri Lanka studying the adoption of information computer technology by its rural communities. Recently, she has also become interested in studying self-help and self-development programs as a means through which to study neoliberal subjectivities and aspirations.

Philip Grant
Admitted in 2006. His work focuses on Iranian intellectuals, both in the diaspora (Southern California and Toronto) and in Iran. He is interested in the intellectual in the broad, "organic" sense and so his fieldwork is oriented toward a variety of activists as well as academics, writers, and philosophers. He is exploring both the multiple practices of being an intellectual and the philosophical, historical and genealogical articulations between and mutual constitution of the figure of the intellectual, the emergence of the public sphere, and the theologico-political in Iran. He holds an MA in Political Sociology from Sciences Po, Paris, and previously worked as an investment banker in London.

Eun Hae Jeong (ehjeong at uci dot edu)
Admitted in 2007. Eun Hae Jeong received her B.A. in anthropology at Tufts University in 2007. Her larger interests are in the various forms of nationalism and globalization, especially in forms manifested through media, cultural heritage, and identity formation. Her geographical location of interest is East Asia. Her current interest is in understanding the articulation of national identity and the process of globalization through the adoption of South Korean infants outside of Korea.

Cortney Hughes (clhughes at uci dot edu)
Admitted in 2004. Cortney graduated from Iowa State University in 2004 with a B.S. in anthropology. During her undergraduate career, she also studied at the University of South Carolina and Al Akhawayn University in Ifrane, Morocco. Cortney received her M.A. in anthropology from UCI and is additionally pursuing the Graduate Feminist Emphasis. She is currently conducting fieldwork in Rabat, Morocco (January 2008 - Spring 2009) with a grant from the American Institute for Maghreb Studies (AIMS). Her research focuses on how "human development "informs Moroccan women's experiences surrounding fertility and motherhood and their notions of citizenship. She is interested in how the Moroccan government's National Initiative for Human Development, launched in 2005, is filtered to women through reproductive health care and how women interpret the precedents of the policy. Cortney is also interested in the circumstances under which Islam may influence women's reproductive decision making. She conducted preliminary research for this project in 2005, 2006, and 2007 which included interning at the Association Marocaine de Planification Familiale and working with a women's development center. Her preliminary work was funded by the School of Social Sciences and the Department of Anthropology at UCI. In the fall of 2007, Cortney was awarded the pre-dissertation fellowship from the School of Social Sciences to prepare for her fieldwork.

Jeff Katcherian (jkatcher uci dot edu)
Admitted in 2004. Graduated from UC Irvine with a B.S. in biological sciences and a B.A. in international studies. Then moved on to American University to receive an M.A. in public anthropology. Jeff is conducting dissertation research on the bureaucratic management of "culture" in the European Union.

Jordan Kraemer (jkraemer at uci dot edu)
Admitted in 2006. Jordan holds an MA in social science from the University of Chicago, and a BA in medieval studies from Wesleyan University. Her research focuses on the role of new technologies and digital media in everyday life, particularly in the context of youth and consumer culture. She has conducted field research with subcultural youth in Chicago and Berlin, and received a summer research grant from the Center for German and European Studies. She plans to continue examining questions of new media in the construction of the social imaginary, particularly with regards to local, regional, and global scales.

Alexandra Lippman (lippmana at uci dot edu)
Admitted in 2007. Alexandra received her BA in anthropology from Bryn Mawr College in 2005. After graduating, she worked in film in Rio de Janeiro and New York City. Her interests include ethnographic filmmaking, dance, transnationalism, and the politics of race, space, and media in Rio de Janeiro.

Adonia Lugo (lugoa at uci dot edu)
Admitted 2007. She received her B.A. in Anthropology from Reed College in 2005, where she completed a thesis about representations of space in Orange County over the course of the 1770s-2000s. That work focused on crafting a historically grounded response to postmodern urbanist characterizations of the area, an effort spurred by her experience growing up in San Juan Capistrano. Her current research interests include the alcohol and drug recovery field, public transportation, car culture in Southern California, and bicycles. Adonia hopes to help forge an anthropology that engages with daily practices and popular conceptions of them. She lives in Long Beach.

Sylvia Martin (sjmartin uci dot edu)
Admitted in 2001. Sylvia is currently completing her dissertation, "Fantasy at Work: The Culture of Production in the Hollywood and Hong Kong Media Industries". In this anthropological study of media production she examines themes of technology, labor, and capital in local and transnational contexts. Sylvia has conducted multi-sited fieldwork in production offices and on film/tv sets in Hollywood and Hong Kong. She has published a book chapter translated into Chinese, "Producing Identity: Transnational Film Industries, published by Oxford University Press. She has also published an article in Scope: An Online Journal of Film Studies. Sylvia is the recipient of a 2008 Top Student Paper Award from the International Communication Association, and is the research assistant for the Cultures of Virtual Worlds workshop co-sponsored by UCI's Anthropology Dept. and Intel Corporation. Her dissertation writing has been funded by a 2007 Regents' Dissertation Fellowship. In 2007 Sylvia was invited to give a radio interview on the Writers' Guild of America strike, and was awarded the Art Rubel Graduate Student Paper Award in 2006. Her research has won numerous grants from the UC Pacific Rim Research Program, UCI's Labor Studies Group, Center for Asian Studies, and UCI's School of Social Sciences and Department of Anthropology. In addition to presenting papers at the American Anthropological Association, she organized a panel on media governance and globalization for the Global Studies Association conference. Other paper presentations include Stanford University's Graduate Student Conference in Cultural and Social Anthropology, the Society of Cinema & Media Studies, the Fulbright Symposium in Hong Kong, Hong Kong Baptist University's Department of Cinema and Television, and UCLA's Transnational & Transcolonial Studies Graduate Student Conference.

Connie McGuire (cmcguire at uci.edu)
Admitted in 2004. Connie's work is within the emerging sub-discipline, the Anthropology of Public Policy. Connie's dissertation research is about the history of the formation of a federal gang policy: The United States Strategy to Combat Criminal Gangs from Central America and Mexico. She is interested in how gangs have emerged as a criminal problem and a population of concern to the US government via transnational circuits of knowledge production, which include government bureaucrats, academic and other "gang experts," and advocates working with NGOs. She is particularly interested in alternative formulations of gangs as a problem, and alternative solutions to that so-called problem. She will conduct her dissertation fieldwork in Los Angeles, Washington DC, Guatemala City, Tegucigalpa, San Salvador, and Mexico City in 2008-2009, by tracing the history of the problematization of two specific gangs, Mara Salvatrucha and the 18th Street Gang, which are active in the US and in Central America. Connie has worked professionally doing research about Central American gangs in the Washington DC area and writing a Resource Manual for attorneys working on gang-related asylum cases with the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), a non-profit, human rights organization that works to influence US policy toward Latin America.  She is also a member of the Transnational Network for the Study of Youth Gangs, which is housed at the Instituto Tecnologico Autonomo de Mexico (ITAM). Connie has received support for her research from UCI's Global Peace and Conflict Studies (GPACS), the Department of Anthropology, and with the Regents Pre-dissertation Research Fellowship and the Regent's Early Career Fellowship.

Shellie McKinley (smasri uci dot edu)
Admitted in 2001. Shellie's dissertation research focuses on the scientific and cultural production of knowledge at archaeological sites. She is attempting to understand those processes and micro-processes by which artifacts become objects of signification of cultural and national identity. Her work examines scientific practice, cultural heritage, and the production of Italian and European identities. Shellie has extensive archaeological training and has been working closely with a team of archaeologists in Pompeii, Italy. Her dissertation research on archaeological practice in the new Europe was funded by the National Science Foundation. She is currently writing her dissertation.

Caroline Melly (cmelly uci dot edu)
Admitted 2002. Caroline is currently completing a manuscript entitled "Uncertain Returns: Investment, Migration, and Urban Futures in Dakar, Senegal," based on twenty months of ethnographic fieldwork. Her dissertation research examines how both state officials and urban residents in Dakar are increasingly reconsidering migration not as a tool for propping up households on a day-to-day basis, but as a strategy for investing, for generating future returns that exceed concerns for the day-to-day. She explores how this reorientation of state and public priorities has, in the context of Dakar, brought about new hierarchies and exclusions, state strategies, ideas about articipation, and notions of wealth. Her research involved an internship at Senegal's national investment promotion agency, which was looking to create a "diasporic entrepreneur" program; "mobile" interviews with cab drivers; and extensive work with return migrants, investors, and residents who consider themselves excluded from transnational networks. Caroline's research was funded by the National Science Foundation, the Fulbright Hays Doctoral Dissertation Abroad program, the School of Social Science, and the Department of Anthropology. Her scholarly interests also include visual anthropology, transnational feminism, and African, legal, and urban studies. In fall 2008, Caroline will be joining the faculty at Smith College as Assistant Professor of Anthropology.

Marissa Menna (mmenna at uci dot edu)
Admitted in 2006. Marisa graduated from New York University in 2006 with a BA in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, and has also studied Arabic language in Damascus, Syria and at the American University in Cairo. Her research focuses on the liberalization of the Syrian economy as it is manifested in political art and public space in Damascus as well as in changing configurations of ambition, desire, and personhood among a number of Damascus-based publics.

Elham Mireshghi (emireshg at uci dot edu)
Admitted in 2007. Elham received her B.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from UC Berkeley where she also completed a minor in Anthropology. She also has experience working in the intellectual property arena and is a licensed patent agent. Her interests are currently quite varied and range from globalization, mass media, visual anthropology and popular culture to technology, intellectual property, and medical
anthropology. She hopes to conduct her research in the Middle East (particularly Iran).

Amanda Moore (moorea uci dot edu)
Admitted in 1995. In 2001, she received two fellowships for her fieldwork on indigenous rights, environmental politics and whaling in the Pacific Northwest from the Pacific Rim Foundation and from the Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation.

Erin Moran (emoran uci dot edu)
Admitted in 2005, Erin Moran received her M.A. in Ethnic Studies from San Francisco State University and her B.A. in Latin American and Latino Studies from UC Santa Cruz. During that time, she focused on the relationship between the discursive construction of immigrant women in California and their subjective experiences of migration to the US. Between her undergraduate and graduate studies, Erin volunteered for the US Peace Corps in Ukraine, and worked in the U.S. at a NGO serving African refugees. Her research interests include migration, citizenship, gender, human rights, and nationalisms. Her current research examines the relationship between legal discourse and refugee and asylum seeking women's political subjectivity in Ireland. In particular, she is interested in understanding how refugee and asylum seeking women are experiencing the impact of the 27th Amendment to Constitution of Ireland (which abolished birthright citizenship) in their daily lives, and how they are negotiating or resisting its effects.

Sheena Nahm (snahm uci dot edu)
Admitted in 2004. Sheena Nahm graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 2001, where she received Bachelor of Arts degrees in Biological Basis of Behavior (biopsychology) and Anthropology. Since then, she has also received her Masters in Public Health from Drexel University, with an emphasis in Community Health and Prevention. During that time, she was involved in several research projects ranging from health issues among refugees and asylum seekers to food insecurity among urban African American women. Her master's thesis evaluated the effectiveness of hepatitis B multi-media education among Asian immigrant youth in Philadelphia. In the summer of 2005, she conducted preliminary field research in New York and Los Angeles, working with the US headquarters of Mdecins Sans Frontires (MSF), an international human rights organization that provides emergency medical relief in nearly 70 countries. For her preliminary fieldwork, she received a 2004-2005 UCI grant, funded by the Regents of the University of California and the State of California. Her current research interests relate to the adaptation of medical programs from the United States to parts of East Asia; in particular, she is focusing on the implementation of play therapy programs in South Korea for children diagnosed with attachment disorders. In addition to issues of transnational knowledge production and regulation of medical program protocols across borders, she is interested in how the adaptation of a play therapy program affects local caretakers' and practitioners' perceptions of nature-culture, normal-abnormal, and work-play with respect to the malleability of social behavior. She is currently in Korea conducting dissertation research with the support of the Korea Foundation.

Guillermo Narvez (gnarvaez uci dot edu)
Admitted in 2003. Guillermo is currently conducting dissertation research on social and environmental certifications in the coffee trade between the US and Nicaragua. His research examines how Fair Trade and other sustainability certifications fit into new forms of neoliberal governance through their reliance on transnational voluntary standards and independent auditing, thereby privatizing the regulation of the production of agricultural commodities. He has conducted fieldwork in Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Honduras and East Timor, with funding from the Department of Anthropology and the School of Social Sciences at UC Irvine. His interests include coffee and the emergence of Central American nations, postcolonialism, development, neoliberalism, transnationalism, and the anthropology of food and consumption.

Natalie Newton (nnewton at uci dot edu)
Admitted in 2005. BA in women's studies, UCLA 2005. Vietnam, Vietnamese gender/kinship/sexuality, queer studies, transnational feminisms, queer activisms.

Joanne Randa Nucho (jnucho at uci dot edu)
Admitted in 2007. Joanne received her BFA from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts where she studied film and television production, and interned with documentary filmmaker Albert Maysles. After graduating, she pursued her interests in documentary and ethnographic film production, showing some of her shorter works in various film festivals and on public television programs. She further developed her production skills while working as a professional film and television editor. She received her MA from UCLA's Islamic Studies Inter-disciplinary Program, where she completed a master's thesis paper and accompanying documentary video project on a transnational Middle Eastern community in Southern California. Her research interests include transnational migration, mass media, cinema, urban spaces and modernity. She regards film and video as both a primary source for study as well as a mode of scholarly production and communication.

Judith Pajo (jpajo uci dot edu)
Admitted in 2002. Judith is currently writing her dissertation, Recycling Culture: Environmental Beliefs and Economic Practices in Post-1990 Germany. Her fieldwork was funded by the National Science Foundation, the Newkirk Center for Science and Society at the University of California, Irvine, the Center for German and European Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, as well as the School of Social Sciences and the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine.

Seo Young Park (pseoyoun uci dot edu)
Admitted in 2005. Seo Young received a B.A. in Sociology and French Literature and M.A. in Culture and Gender Studies from Yonsei University, South Korea. Her current research explores the experience and making of time in Dongdaemun Market, South Korea. She is interested in looking at the construction of temporalities of the 24-hour city through NGO experiment, transnational circuits of production-consumption, and labor experiences. Seo Young is also the pursuing the Graduate Feminist Emphasis in the Women's Studies Department. Seo Young presented papers at Thinking Gender, Annual Graduate Student Research Conference and American Anthropological Association, and was awarded the Art Rubel Graduate Student Paper Award in 2007. To support preliminary fieldwork, she received grants from the Anthropology and Center for Asian Studies at UCI.

Robert Phillips (phillipr uci dot edu)
Admitted 2003. Robert Phillips comes to UCI from the University of Pittsburgh with a BS in Molecular Biology and Biotechnology and an MA in Religious Studies. His MA focused on nationalist aspects of contemporary religious practice in South India as well as on nineteenth and twentieth-century Judaism. He contributed the "Trikon" entry for the GLBT History Project and he is the co-editor of the Sanskrit glossary included in "History of Religion in India" (Routledge 2007). He contributed "Queering the Indian Diaspora: Observations on National and Sexual Identity in Singapore, "to the edited volume "Indian Diaspora in Singapore: Cultures, Performances, and Identities" forthcoming from National University of Singapore Press. Conducted preliminary fieldwork in India and Singapore in Summers 2005 and 2005, funded by the School of Social Sciences and the Department of Anthropology at UC-Irvine. His dissertation research, funded by grants from the National Science Foundation and Intel Corporation focuses on how gay men and lesbian women in Singapore utilize technology in the reconfiguration of national and sexual identity. He is currently writing his dissertation with the support of a James Harvey Fellowship and a Regents Dissertation Writing Fellowship.

Morgan Romine (mromine at uci dot edu)
Admitted in 2007. Morgan received her BA in anthropology from UC Berkeley in 2003. After graduation, she worked for four years as a professional gamer and community manager for video game publisher Ubisoft in San Francisco, CA. Morgan's academic pursuits are motivated by a life-long fascination with social interactions and games, and guided by her years of experience with multiplayer online games like World of Warcraft. Her specific interests include collaborative social efforts in virtual worlds, social networking and communications technology, gender identity in online games, and competitive gaming.

Kim Sullivan (sullivak uci dot edu)
Admitted in 2005 with a Social Science Fellowship. Kim Sullivan holds B.A. degrees in Music and Classics. She is interested in anthropology of modernity and anthropology of science and technology.

Erica Vogel (vogele uci dot edu)
Admitted in 2005. Erica received a BA in Creative Writing and Social History from Carnegie Mellon University. From 2000-2004, she taught English and managed a language school in Seoul, South Korea. While living in Korea, Erica witnessed thousands of migrant factory workers lose their legal status with the implementation of a new migration policy, the Employee Permit System. Her current research explores the impact of this policy through the experience of Peruvian migrants in South Korea. She is interested in looking at the relationship between these migrants, the churches that minister to them (Catholic, evangelical, and Jehovah’s Witness), and state modes of surveillance in South Korea. To support preliminary fieldwork, she received grants from the Pacific Rim Research Foundation (2007), the Department of Anthropology at University of California, Irvine (2006, 2007), and UCI’s Center for Asian Studies (2007). She has presented papers on this subject at the AAA meetings (2007) and at the First International Congress at Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos in Lima, Peru (2007). Her dissertation research will be supported by a grant from the Korean Foundation (2008-2009). She is currently an Editorial Assistant for American Ethnologist Book Reviews.

Neha Vora
Admitted in 2002. Neha is currently finishing her dissertation titled, "Participatory Exclusion: The Emirati State, Forms of Belonging, and Dubai's Indian Middle Class," based on fieldwork conducted in 2004, 2006, and 2007. Her research focuses on the dynamics of race, class, and gender in the United Arab Emirates and how they affect the large Indian migrant population. By focusing on the overlaps between state and expatriate discourses, she considers how migrants, who officially do not have access to citizenship or permanent residency, are often participants in the production of forms of exclusion and exploitation in contemporary Dubai. Neha is a recipient of the Anthropology Department's Dissertation Fellowship on Domesticity and Technology (2006), the Dean's Fellowship in the Graduate Feminist Emphasis (2005), a Regent's Pre-dissertation Fellowship (2004), and a Social Science Merit Fellowship (2002). She has also received multiple grants from the Center for Asian Studies and is currently the Editorial Assistant for American Anthropologist. Neha has also completed the Graduate Feminist Emphasis in the Women's Studies Department and holds an MA in Women's Studies from San Francisco State University. As of Fall 2008 she will be Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Women's Studies at Texas A&M University.

Lien Vu (lmvu uci dot edu)
Admitted in 2005. Lien received her BS in Anthropology with an emphasis in Applied Anthropology from Santa Clara University in 2005. Her research explores the sociopolitical intersections between the Socialist Republic of Vietnam and diasporic Vietnamese Americans through the medium of "Vietnamese cinema." Vietnam's contemporary cinema industry is currently transitioning from a centralized to market-driven sector and is drawing heavily from international resources for financial and creative assistance. One such resource is Vietnamese American filmmakers in Southern California, a group that is developing its own "Viet Film Wave" in the United States and is also capitalizing on the Vietnamese state's invitation to shoot film projects on-location on Vietnamese soil. Lien's research therefore attempts to analyze how diasporic-homeland relations, notions of modernization in Vietnam, and depoliticized discourses shape and inform these transnational film production collaborations.

Shaozeng Zhang (zhangs at uci dot edu)
Admitted in 2007. Shaozeng received his BA in sociology and MA in anthropology in Peking University, Beijing, China in 2004 and 2007. His bachelor thesis is on the grassroots democracy in rural China. His master thesis is on grassland desertification and rehabilitation in Alxa district in Northwestern China. Currently, he is interested in 1) the environmental changes and environmental NGOs in local settings in China and Brazil, and 2) the unconscious connections of local behaviors through global circulations of products, sandstorms and environmental discourses in the context of globalization.