CHCI 2024 New Advisory Board Members

The CHCI Nominations Committee welcomes five new board members to CHCI: Bianet Castellanos, Wendy Chun, Cajetan Iheka, Patricia Parker, and Cristina Stanciu.

We also warmly welcome the following board members for their second term: Paul Fleming, Jennifer Ho, Amy Lind, and Richard Neer.

The Nominations Committee for the 2023-24 nominations cycle included board members Amanda Anderson, Rosinka Chaudhuri, Kylie Message-Jones, Christopher Newfield, and Kerill O’Neill.

The committee welcomed nominations from the entire membership from the 2023 Annual Meeting to the end of November 2023. The board approved a slate of candidates, and this slate was presented to the membership for a vote in February 2024 and was approved. We expect that the committee will again begin accepting nominations after our next Annual Meeting in June 2024.

Bianet Castellanos is an anthropologist, the chair of American Studies in the College of Liberal Arts, and the director of the Institute for Advanced Study at the University of Minnesota Twin-Cities. She is an affiliate faculty in American Indian Studies, Chicano and Latino Studies, Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies, and the Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Global Change. Her recent book, Indigenous Dispossession: Housing and Maya Indebtedness in Mexico (Stanford University Press 2021), analyzes how Maya families make sense of the cultural, political, and legal ramifications of neoliberal housing policies that privilege mortgage finance over land redistribution. It was awarded the Gregory Bateson Book Prize, Arthur Rubel Book Prize, and Edward Bruner Book Prize. Her other works include A Return to Servitude: Maya Migration and the Tourist Trade in Cancún (University of Minnesota Press 2010), Comparative Indigeneities of the Américas: Toward a Hemispheric Approach, which she co-edited with Lourdes Gutiérrez Nájera and Arturo Aldama (University of Arizona Press 2012), and the anthology Detours: Travel and the Ethics of Research in the Global South (University of Arizona Press 2019). She edited a forum on settler colonialism in Latin America for America Quarterly and is a member of the Critical Latinx Indigeneities Working Group, the INRS Dialog, and Mexico’s Sistema Nacional de Investigadores. She teaches courses on Indigenous urbanisms, immigration, tourism, American politics and popular culture, and the US-Mexico border. She served for five years as a board member of El Colegio High School in Minneapolis.

Wendy Hui Kyong Chun is Simon Fraser University’s Canada 150 Research Chair in New Media, Professor in the School of Communication, and Director of the Digital Democracies Institute. At the Institute, she leads the Mellon-funded Data Fluencies Project, which combines the interpretative traditions of the arts and humanities with critical work in the data sciences to express, imagine, and create innovative engagements with (and resistances to) our data-filled world.

She has studied both Systems Design Engineering and English Literature, which she combines and mutates in her research on digital media. She is author many books, including: Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics (MIT, 2006), Programmed Visions: Software and Memory (MIT 2011), Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media (MIT 2016), and Discriminating Data: Correlation, Neighborhoods, and the New Politics of Recognition (2021, MIT Press). She has been Professor and Chair of the Department of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University, where she worked for almost two decades and is currently a Visiting Professor. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and has also held fellowships from: the Guggenheim, ACLS, American Academy of Berlin, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard.

Cajetan Iheka specializes in African literature, ecocriticism, ecomedia, and postcolonial literature. He serves as director of the Whitney Humanities Center, chair of the Council on African Studies, and head of the Africa Initiative at Yale. Professor Iheka is the author of Naturalizing Africa: Ecological Violence, Agency, and Postcolonial Resistance in African Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2018), winner of the 2019 Ecocriticism Book Award of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment, and the 2020 First Book Prize of the African Literature Association. His latest single-authored book is African Ecomedia: Network Forms, Planetary Politics (Duke University Press, 2021). The monograph, which positions Africa at the center of discourses on media ecologies, materiality, and infrastructure, received six book prizes. Among other accolades, African Ecomedia won the 2022 African Studies Association Best Book Prize (formerly Herskovits Book Prize), the Ecocriticism Book Award of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment, and the Harold and Margaret Sprout Award of the International Studies Association. He is also editor of the MLA volume Teaching Postcolonial Environmental Literature and Media (2022); and coedited African Migration Narratives: Politics, Race, and Space (University of Rochester Press, 2018), and Environmental Transformations, a special issue of African Literature Today.

Professor Iheka is currently working on a comparative study of the cultural and formal intimacies of African and Caribbean literatures. He serves as Editor-in-Chief of African Studies Review, the multidisciplinary journal of the African Studies Association.

Patricia (Pat) Parker (Ph.D. University of Texas at Austin) is the Ruel W. Tyson Distinguished Professor of Humanities and Director of the Institute for the Arts and Humanities at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she previously served as chair of the Department of Communication and Director of the Graduate Certificate in Participatory Research. A critical communication scholar activist and decolonial researcher, her work centers Black feminist/womanist leadership as critical organizing praxis. Her scholarship includes two books, two coedited book series, and dozens of articles and book chapters. Her most recent book, Ella Baker’s Catalytic Leadership (University of California Press) is grounded in the Black intellectual traditions advanced by human rights strategist Ella Baker. It is a primer on community engagement drawn from her experiences working alongside Black teen girls learning and doing social justice leadership following those traditions. Pat’s current projects flow from her work as co-chair of the University Commission on History and Race where she is leading efforts to center Black descendant communities in telling the histories of their ancestors and memorializing them, while creating pathways toward reckoning, healing, and repair. Parker is the 2023 recipient of the Thomas Jefferson Award, one of the highest honors for UNC-Chapel Hill faculty in recognition of academic work that exemplifies the ideals of democracy, public service, and the pursuit of knowledge.

Cristina Stanciu is an Associate Professor of English and the Director of the Humanities Research Center at Virginia Commonwealth University, a position she’s held since December 2020. Under her leadership, the HRC became a university-wide designated center at VCU in 2022. She is a scholar of Indigenous and multiethnic literatures of the United States and visual culture, author and editor of four books, three edited journal special issues, and over a dozen peer-reviewed articles and book chapters. She is an editorial board member of PMLA and NAIS, and served as book review editor of MELUS between 2020 and 2023. Select publications include The Makings and Unmakings of Americans: Indians and Immigrants in American Literature and Culture, 1879-1924 (Yale UP, 2023), Race in the Multiethnic Literature Classroom (co-editor, U of Illinois P, 2024), and a forthcoming edited volume, Indigenous Media Ecologies. In the last five years Stanciu was awarded two Fulbright Awards and an Obama Fellowship. In April 2023, the College of Humanities and Sciences at VCU awarded her the Distinguished Service Award.