UCLA: PROF VICTOR BASCARA RECEIVES TENURE

The UCLA Asian American Studies Center and Department are very pleased to share the wonderful news that Dr. Victor Bascara has been promoted to Associate Professor, Step II with tenure in the Department of Asian American Studies at UCLA.  He is also an active member of the Faculty Advisory Committee of the Asian American Studies Center.

Professor Bascara's research and teaching interests include Asian American literature and cultural politics, postcolonial studies, Filipino / Filipino American studies, comparative ethnic studies, critical race theory, and queer studies.  He is the author of Model Minority Imperialism (University of Minnesota Press, 2006), which traces U.S. economic, political, and cultural hegemony back to the turn of the century through an examination of Asian American cultural production.  His study analyzes how Asian American culture uncovers the repressed story of U.S. imperialism in ways that demand that the imperial present reckon with its imperial pasts.  His essays, articles, and reviews have been published in such journals as American Quarterly, Amerasia, the Journal of Asian American Studies, and Multi-Ethnic Literatures of the United States (MELUS) and in such volumes as Imagining Our Americas:  Towards an International Frame, East Main Street:  Asian American Popular Culture, and Q & A:  Queer in Asian America.

Among his current projects is a second monograph near completion on the contestation between colonialism and isolationism in U.S. culture between the World Wars.  He is also at work on a book on the emergence of Asian American refugee culture in the Cold War.  And he is co-editing, with Professors John D. Blanco of UC-San Diego and Courtney Johnson of the University of Wisconsin - Madison, a collection of scholarly essays on the transition from Spanish to U.S. colonialisms in the Philippines and other sites in the Pacific, Caribbean, and Latin America, a volume emerging from a multi-year Mellon-funded humanities workshop.

Dr. Bascara's parents immigrated from the Philippines in the early 1960s, settling down in New Jersey, where he was born and raised.  He received his B.A in English with a minor in Ethnic Studies from UC - Berkeley.  He went on to complete an M.A. in English also at Berkeley, writing a thesis under the direction of Oscar Campomanes.  His Ph.D. is from the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.  Prior to joining the faculty at UCLA, he had been a faculty member in English and Asian American Studies at the University of Wisconsin - Madison, where he received tenure in 2006.