2010-2011 Mentorship Participants

V. Calderon & M. ThomasVincent Calderon is from Chula Vista, San Diego, and is a second year history major. He has an interest in the history of radical thought, labor history, economic development, international relations, and activism. His interests were heavily shaped by his experiences near the border, his involvement in community activism, and personal struggle. His plan after UCSC is to apply for a history graduate program or law school, with the intent of becoming a full time activist for human rights.

Megan Thomas is Associate Professor of Politics at UC Santa Cruz, where she teaches courses in political theory. In her research, she is interested in questions of how political thought travels in different ways (from one place to another, from one language to another, from one era to another). She is currently finishing the final revisions to her book manuscript, Orientalism and Colonial Scholarship: Filipino Intellectuals in the Late Nineteenth Century, and is beginning work on two new projects. First, she is interested in the ideas of Mikhail Bakunin (19th-century Russian anarchist thinker), and how they help us think about how enlightenment might require secrecy, and reconceive the difference between education and propaganda. Second, she is interested an 18th-century revolt led by Diego Silang in Ilocos, in the Philippines, and in how representations of the revolt illustrate the ways that contemporary politics shape the language in which past events are related.

Summary of Project
Vinny will assist Megan with research and preparation of the bibliography for the paper on Michael Bakunin. Vinny will also do preliminary research and produce an annotated bibliography on the revolt led by Diego Silang in the Philippines. Vinny may also assist Megan with the preparation of her book manuscript on late nineteenth-century Filipino nationalist writings.


Hinojosa and ChristyMichael Hinojosa is a third year at UCSC as a History Major with an emphasis on East Asia and Islamic World. He is interested in studying the pre-modern and modern eras of history as the social and political dynamics of these periods can tell us a lot about the world as it is today. He is also interested in the histories of people who are often left out of many historical narratives around the world. He came to an interest in this type of historical narrative when he worked as a peer assistance leader in high school where he met many students who felt they did not have the same recognition and respect as many of their peers. He hopes to go on to graduate school after graduating from UCSC, and become a Professor of History. Michael Hinojosa is also the proud son of Gerardo Hinojosa.

Alan Christy (Associate Professor of History) is a specialist in modern Japanese and East Asian History. He got his degree from the University of Chicago, came to UC Santa Cruz in 1995, and has taught at the University of Tokyo as a visiting professor (2004-2006). He is co-director of the Center for the Study of Pacific War Memories, with Prof. Alice Yang, where he is directing four collaborative research projects in California, Japan, Okinawa and China. His earlier work was on the history of ethnography in Japan and he is now working on a study of the postwar lives of wartime monuments in Japan.

Summary of Project
Michael will be working with Prof. Christy on organizing a very large collection of images collected from Japan, Okinawa and China for the research projects of the Center for the Study of Pacific War Memories. Michael will be preparing these materials for inclusion in an online archive the Center is constructing, called "Eternal Flames: Living Memories of the Pacific War." His work will include attaching metadata to archival images that will help future researchers determine how the images might be used as either primary or secondary sources for their research. He will also conduct original research on some of the items in the collection to establish models for how future users of the site can contribute information about archival materials. In the course of this work, Michael will get first-hand experience with how historians work with primary sources and he will have an opportunity to conduct his own historical research on some of the items.


Medina and GleasonClaudia Medina is originally from Watsonville. She is a first-generation fourth year college student, majoring in LALS. Her interests are immigration, effects of immigration status and labor issues. 

Shannon Gleeson is Assistant Professor of Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She received her Ph.D. in 2008 in Sociology and Demography from the University of California, Berkeley. Her research focuses on the workplace experiences of immigrants, and immigrant civic engagement.

Summary of Project
Claudia will be working on a project that assesses the experience of low-wage and immigrant workers. We are collaborating with several San Francisco Bay Area law clinics to survey and interview workers who - with the assistance of legal aid centers - have taken the step to file a formal claim in the wake of a labor violation. What we hope to uncover is the bureaucratic, linguistic and cultural challenges workers face in this process, and the resources they draw on to navigate them.


Osipov and AndersonSaina Osipov was born in Baku, Azerbaijan and immigrated to the Bay Area with her family at the age of six. She is an anthropology major with a focus on the socio-cultural field and plans to attend graduate school in the near future. She studied abroad in Siena, Italy for part of her junior year and has a strong desire to incorporate traveling into her future work. She is bilingual in English and Russian, hopes to be able to converse in Spanish within a year, and plans to learn more languages during her free time and in graduate school.

Mark Anderson is Associate Professor of Anthropology at UCSC. His main research interests include the study of race and ethnicity, transnationalism, Central America, the African Diaspora, consumption, and tourism. He is the author of Black and Indigenous: Garifuna Activism and Consumer Culture in Honduras, University of Minnesota Press, 2009. He has two ongoing research projects: on the concepts of race and racism in the history of anthropology; and on the tourist industry in Honduras.

Summary of Project
They will work together on an annotated bibliography on the anthropology of tourism, with a particular focus on work that looks at questions or race and ethnicity, tourism in Latin America and the Caribbean, and issues of socioeconomic inequality. Saina will also provide occasional research assistant on an article Mark is writing on the politics of contemporary multiculturalism in Honduras.


Tihanyi and GersterLoren Tihanyi is a third-year Film and Digital Media major with a concentration in Production and a minor in Education. As a first-generation college student, she is looking to concentrate on bilingual education and pursue tutoring sessions for English as a Second Language students in the Santa Cruz area over the summer. She hopes one day to travel with the Peace Corps to join their Education program and teach English to underprivileged children in developing countries. Loren has a great interest in the representation of race and culture in media and film.

Carole Gerster has been a faculty member at UC-Santa Cruz since 2001. She has a Ph. D. in literature and critical studies from the University of Minnesota and has done post-graduate film studies at UC-Berkeley. Prior to coming to UCSC, she was Professor of film and literature at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls. She teaches courses on race and ethnicity in film for Film and Digital Media and teaches writing and the topics of cultural identity and global consciousness for Merrill Core. Her research focus is race and ethnicity in U.S. film; her book on the topic is Teaching Ethnic Diversity with Film (McFarland, 2006).

Summary of Project
They will work together on two research projects. The first is research for a short DVD on the topic of Institutionalized/ Systemic Racism. This will involve researching critical race theory definitions and choosing and compiling film clips that illustrate the many facets of this complex topic. The second project is research for a book on the film Crash, including critical controversies, writers’ and director’s intentions via interviews, production facts about costs and casting and music choices, and correspondences between the film’s representations and race and ethnicity as it is expressed and experienced in 21st-century American culture.