Namiko Kunimoto
Director, Center for Ethnic Studies
Associate Professor, Department of History of Art
Namiko Kunimoto is a specialist in Asian American studies as well as modern and contemporary Japanese art. Her research interests include the visual politics of race and gender, art and diaspora, and issues of migration and nation-formation. Her essays include “Intimate Archives: Japanese-Canadian Family Photography, 1939-1945” in Art History, “Olympic Dissent: Art, Politics, and the Tokyo Games” in Asia Pacific Japan Focus, “Photographic Pluralities” in Blackflash Magazine, and “Tactics and Strategies: Chen Qiulin and the Production of Space” in Art Journal.
Elissa Washuta
Program Director, American Indian Studies
Associate Professor, Department of English
Elissa Washuta is a member of the Cowlitz Indian Tribe and a nonfiction writer. She is the author of Starvation Mode and My Body is a Book of Rules, named a finalist for the Washington State Book Award. With Theresa Warburton, she is the co-editor of the anthology Shapes of Native Nonfiction: Collected Essays by Contemporary Writers. She has received fellowships and awards from the National Endowment of the Arts, Creative Capital, Artist Trust, 4Culture, and Potlach Fund. Her book White Magic is forthcoming from Tin House Books.
Martin Joseph "Joe" Ponce
Program Director, Asian American Studies
Associate Professor, Department of English
Martin Joseph ("Joe") Ponce is an associate professor of English whose teaching and research interests focus on Asian American, African American, and comparative U.S. ethnic literatures and cultures; queer of color and queer diasporic critique; and histories and theories of U.S. empire. He has served as the (co-)coordinator of the Asian American Studies Program, the Sexuality Studies Program, and the Diversity and Identity Studies Collective (DISCO), as well as a lead co-organizer of the three “Queer Places, Practices, and Lives” conferences at OSU. His current research projects include a queer examination of contemporary Asian American literature’s retrospective critiques of the Asian American movement’s central ideologies; and a queer diasporic analysis of Asian American literature’s critical reckonings with Japanese imperialism and U.S. exceptionalism.
César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández
Program Director, Latinx Studies
Professor and Gregory H. Williams Chair in Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, The Ohio State University College of Law
César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández holds the Gregory H. Williams Chair in Civil Rights and Civil Liberties at Ohio State University where he is a professor of law. César writes and teaches about the intersection of criminal and immigration law. He has published three books, Welcome the Wretched: In Defense of the “Criminal Alien” (2024), Migrating to Prison: America’s Obsession with Locking Up Immigrants (2019), and Crimmigration Law (2015). His scholarly articles about the right to counsel for migrants in the criminal legal system, immigration imprisonment, and race-based immigration policing have appeared in Dædalus, the California Law Review, UCLA Law Review, Boston University Law Review, and BYU Law Review, among others, earning him a position among the ten most-cited immigration law scholars in the United States.