David K. Yoo, director and professor of the UCLA Asian American Studies Center, has announced that Professor Keith Camacho will become the senior editor of Amerasia Journal, effective Jan. 1, 2014.
Camacho is an award-winning scholar, teacher and active member of the UCLA community. His book “Cultures of Commemoration: The Politics of War, Memory, and History in the Mariana Islands” (University of Hawaii Press) was awarded the Masayoshi Ohira Memorial Prize (Japan) and the Governor’s Humanities Award for Research and Publication in the Humanities (Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands). He is co-editor (with Setsu Shigematsu) of “Militarized Currents: Toward a Decolonized Future in Asia and the Pacific” (University of Minnesota Press).
He received his B.A. from the University of Guam, a masters in Pacific Island studies and a Ph.D. in history (with distinction) from the University of Hawaii at Manoa. His faculty appointment at UCLA is in the Department of Asian American Studies.
Among his many other accolades, Camacho has been the recipient of the Center’s C. Doris and Toshio Hoshide Distinguished Teaching Prize in Asian American Studies as well as the inaugural winner of the Don T. Nakanishi Award for Outstanding Engaged Scholarship in Asian American and Pacific Islander Studies at UCLA.
Camacho’s community-based work involves critically merging the academic and service paradigms of Asian American studies with the everyday concerns of the Pacific Islander communities on a wide range of issues. He has worked closely with multiple Pacific Islander community organizations in Southern California and across Oceania.
Currently, Camacho is a Charles A. Ryskamp Research Fellow with the American Council of Learned Societies and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Camacho is no stranger to Amerasia Journal, having served as guest editor of the landmark special issue “Transoceanic Flows: Pacific Islander Interventions across the American Empire (2011).”
On his appointment, Camacho commented: “I am very excited to work with the great staff at the center and to further the tradition of interdisciplinary excellence long associated with Amerasia Journal.”
The appointment is for three years.