Art History/Visual CultureShiPu Wang
ShiPu Wang specializes in twentieth-century visual culture and theory in the North American and global contexts, with a focus on historical debates on race and nationalism in pre-WWII American art. He is one of a small group of scholars who have done extensive work on rediscovering and reexamining the art of prewar American artists of Asian descent as a way to historicize and advance our contemporary discussion of identity politics in American art and culture. His work also incorporates sociopolitical histories and critical theories, including feminist, postcolonial and critical race theories. With secondary specializations in modern Asian/Chinese art, Professor Wang's scholarship is interdisciplinary and has an underlying global perspective.
Professor Wang is a prolific writer. His publications have appeared in peer-reviewed journals both in English and Chinese, including American Art, the scholarly journal by the Smithsonian American Art Museum (Spring 2008); the special "Art and Cultural Institutions" issue of AAPI Nexus by the Asian American Studies Center at University of California, Los Angeles (Winter/Spring 2007); Yishu-Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art (Winter 2003); and several issues of Journal of Aesthetic Education, the official publication of the Taiwan National Center for Arts Education. In the past decade, Professor Wang has also served as an art critic, columnist, and journalist for several international magazines, such as Art & Collection and Esquire Taipei. He continues to publish bilingually, for he believes a 21st-century scholar must engage the global scholarly community and be an active, contributing member in it.
For more information, please visit his website: faculty.ucmerced.edu/swang7
Music Studies
Kevin Fellezs
Kevin Fellezs joins a small but growing band of fusion (jazz-rock/funk) music scholars. Drawing on insights from critical race and popular music studies, he hears 1970s fusion as sounding out - representing, articulating, performing - multiply-positioned identity, particularly salient within contemporary debates concerning cultural belongings, collective identities and musical traditions. His work on Hawaiian ki ho'alu (slack key guitar) focuses on Hawaiian identity in relation to representations of Hawaiian-ness as they circulate in the discursive sound world of ki ho'alu music, musicians, and audiences. He also maintains an interest in the intersections between African American and Asian American musicians and music cultures. His work is fundamentally concerned with the relationship of musician to musical discourse - how is musical expression described, inscribed and prescribed within that relationship and what limits or expands the descriptions, inscriptions and prescriptions of a particular musical/discursive moment?
Professor Fellezs has an article, "Emergency! Race and Genre in Tony Williams's Lifetime," appearing in the May 2008 issue of Jazz Perspectives. He also has a chapter, "Silenced But Not Silent: Asian Americans and Jazz," in the anthology, Alien Encounters: Asian Americans and Popular Culture (Duke University Press, 2007). His article, "Wise Guy Opera: Music for Sopranos" appeared in This Thing of Ours: Investigating the Sopranos (Columbia University Press, 2002). He is currently completing a manuscript on fusion music tentatively titled Chameleon: Fusion Music and Hybrid Identity.
website: http://faculty.ucmerced.edu/kfellezs/index.html
