UCLA International Institute begins academic year with new and familiar faces

UCLA International Institute, October 10, 2024 — This fall finds a number of faculty in new leadership posts at the International Institute and its many centers and programs.

International Institute appointments

Shaina Potts, associate professor, geography and the International Institute, has taken over the post of equity advisor for the International Institute from Jennifer Jihye Chun, associate professor, Asian American studies and the institute, who served for three years in the position.

Potts will work closely with institute leadership and the UCLA Office of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion to advance strategies for enhancing all three goals, together with protecting civil rights and the dignity of all members of the institute’s community. A faculty member of the institute’s global studies program since 2017, Potts’s new book, “Judicial Territory: Law, Capital and the Expansion of American Empire” (Duke, 2024), explores the transnational extension of U.S. domestic law and judicial authority over economic relations involving foreign — especially postcolonial — governments.

Inmaculada Ma García-Sánchez, professor of social research methodology at the School of Education and Information Studies (SE&IS) and associate director of the Center for the Study of International Migration, has been appointed the International Institute’s community engagement advisor. In that role, she will work with a campuswide network of such advisors to deepen the university’s engagement with Los Angeles and its many communities — one of the major goals of UCLA’s current strategic plan.

García-Sánchez, who also co-directs the L3 (Language, Literacy, and Learning) Collaborative at SE&IS, is a linguistic ethnographer who brings an interdisciplinary perspective to the study of multilingual practices, the schooling of (im)migrant children and youth and larger sociopolitical processes. She is the author of “Language and Muslim Immigrant Childhoods: The Politics of Belonging” (Wiley-Blackwell, 2014) and co-editor of “Language and Cultural Practices in Communities and School” (with Marjorie Faulstich Orellana; Routledge, 2019) and of “Language and Social Justice: Global Perspectives” (Bloomsbury, 2024).

Interim appointments

Michael Thies, associate professor, political science, is serving as interim chair of both the global studies and international and area studies programs of the UCLA International institute for the 2024–25 academic year, during which time Margaret Peters, chair of global studies, takes up the vice chair of graduate studies in the political science department, and Adam Moore, chair of international and area studies, is on leave. One of the long-term institution builders of the institute, Thies previously chaired both two programs and is also a former director of the Terasaki Center for Japanese Studies.

A specialist on modern Japanese politics, Thies is co-author (with Frances McCall Rosenbluth) of “Japan Transformed: Political Change and Economic Restructuring” (Princeton, 2010). Among his recent articles and book chapters are “Review Symposium: 'Beyond Presidentialism and Parliamentarism',” European Political Science 23 (1), and “Did COVID-19 Impact Japan’s 2021 General Election?” (with Yuki Yanai) in “Japan Decides 2021” (Palgrave MacMillan Cham, 2023), ed. R.J. Pekkanen, S.R. Reed and D.M. Smith.

Andrea Goldman, professor of early modern and modern Chinese history, will serve as interim director of the Asia Pacific Center (APC) during the 2024–25 academic year, while Director Min Zhou, professor of sociology and Asian American studies, is on sabbatical. Goldman has been an affiliated faculty member of APC and the Center for Chinese Studies for many years and sits on the faculty advisory committee of both centers.

Her first book, “Opera and the City: The Politics of Culture in Beijing, 1770–1900 “(Stanford, 2012), was awarded the 2014 Joseph A. Levenson Prize for the best monograph on China (pre-1900) from the Association for Asian Studies. The Chinese-language version of the book, for which Goldman was co-translator, was published in Beijing the following year by Social Sciences Academic. She is currently working on the book project, “The Frenchman and the Chinese Opera,” which focuses on the construction of masculinity in China circa 1900–1950, as viewed through the lives of four rough contemporaries, Chinese and Western.

Kristopher W. Kersey, associate professor, art history, will serve as interim associate director of the Terasaki Center for Japanese Studies in 2024–25 while Seiji Lippit, professor, Asian languages and cultures, is on sabbatical. Kersey’s research focuses on the intersecting histories of Japanese art, design and aesthetics.

His first book, “Facing Images: Medieval Japanese Art and the Problem of Modernity” (Penn State, 2024), uses a decolonial approach to Japanese art history to query the meaning of “modernity,” given that the aesthetic markers of modernity were already apparent in 12th-century Japanese art. Kersey recently held the Clark Professorship at the UCLA Center for 17th- and 18th-Century Studies and the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library.

Center director changes

Margaret Peters, professor and vice chair of graduate studies, political science, and professor, International Institute, has become associate director of the Burkle Center for International Relations, where she will help program and moderate events for the center’s busy public program. Peters takes over from her political science colleague, professor Leslie Johns, who spent two years in the position.

An expert on international migration and the global economy, Peters is a non-resident scholar with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Author of the award-winning book, “Trading Barriers: Immigration and the Remaking of Globalization” (Princeton, 2017), Peters is currently working on two large, multi-year, multi-country studies on migration. One project examines migrants’ reasons for migration and the goals they themselves prioritize (funded in part by a large National Science Foundation grant), and the other looks at the impact of emigration on authoritarian stability and democratic change in sending states.

Torquil Duthie, professor and chair, department of Asian languages and cultures, and author of “Man’yōshū and the Imperial Imagination in Early Japan” (Brill, 2014) and translator of “Poesía Clásica Japonesa: Kokinwakashū” (Editorial Trotta, 2005), stepped down as the director of the Center for Buddhist Studies at the end of August 2024. He passes the leadership of the center to his former associate director, Stephanie Balkwill, after serving in the post for the two years during a crucial transition period.

Balkwill, associate professor, Asian languages and cultures, and a specialist on Chinese Buddhism and the role of Buddhist women, is the co-director of the Buddhist Bodies Collective, which curates and publishes open-access, body-centered resources for the teaching of Buddhism at the introductory level and across the humanities more broadly.

She recently published “The Women Who Ruled China: Buddhism, Multiculturalism and Governance in the Sixth Century” (UC Press, open access, 2024). The book explores the life and rule of Empress Dowager Ling, one of the first Buddhist women to wield incredible influence in dynastic East Asia, against the broader world of imperial China under the rule of the Northern Wei dynasty. Building on largely untapped Buddhist materials, the book reveals Dowager Ling’s story as one of reinvention — of religious, ethnic and gender norms — in a rapidly changing multicultural society.

At the Center for European and Russian Studies (CERS), Laurie Kain Hart, professor, anthropology and International Institute, and affiliated faculty, UCLA Center for Social Medicine and the Humanities, and Daniel Treisman, professor, political science and research associate, National Bureau of Economic Research, are serving as co-directors of the center in the 2024–25 academic year.

Hart’s research examines ethnopolitical conflict, population displacements, migration, racism and ethnospatial segregation. Her recently published journal articles address inner city violence, post–civil war spatial orders in Bosnia and Greece and former child political refugees of the Greek Civil War. She is currently engaged in research on the refugee crisis in Greece and working on “Cornered” (provisional title), a co-authored book on the carceral and psychiatric management of U.S. urban poverty and segregation, based on six years of fieldwork in Philadelphia.

Treisman, whose research focuses on Russian politics and economics and comparative political economy, served as interim director of CERS during the 2023–24 academic year, when Hart was on leave. He previously served as center interim director in 2013 (January–June). Treisman is the author or editor of six books, the most recent of which are: “Spin Dictators: The Changing Face of Tyranny in the 21st Century” (with Sergei Guriev; Princeton, 2022) — named best book of the year by The New Yorker, Foreign Affairs, The Atlantic and The Financial Times — and “The New Autocracy: Information, Politics and Policy in Putin’s Russia” (Brookings Institute, 2018).

Sebouh Aslanian (photo from AGBU video still), Richard Hovannisian Endowed Chair in Modern Armenian History and inaugural director of the Armenian Studies Center of the Promise Armenian Institute (PAI) at UCLA, stepped down from his post as director of ASC on September 2, 2024. Author of the “From the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean: Global Trade Networks of Armenian Merchants from New Julfa” (UC Press, 2011), he is currently working on two new book projects. PAI is currently working with its internal advisory board to chart a path for Armenian studies within the institute.

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The International Institute is immensely grateful for the service and contributions of the many talented scholars who recently stepped down from their positions. Without these dedicated faculty leaders, the institute could not accomplish its goal of educating global citizens and making the recent research and developments in the world accessible to our campus community and the greater Los Angeles community. We are profoundly grateful for the many gifts they shared with us. We welcome a few new faculty and old friends to their new positions and wish them great success.