Our Team
Foundations and Futures: Asian Americans and Pacific Islander Multimedia Textbook is a highly collaborative project. The project team draws from content and curriculum experts across the United States and Oceania, including community scholars and practitioners, university professors, high school and college educators, curriculum developers, teachers and teacher trainers. An advisory council of over 50 scholars in Asian American and Pacific Islander Studies provided content, guidance and reviews. The project also maintains working collaborations with organizations including the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center, the National Education Association, Densho, the South Asian American Archive, Japanese American National Museum, Asian Women United, Community Responsive Education, the Yuri Education Project, Immigrant History Initiative, the American Federation of Teachers, among others.
Foundations and Futures is a project of the UCLA Asian American Studies Center.
Meet the Project Directors
Dr. Karen Umemoto
Project Co-Director
Karen Umemoto is a professor of Asian American Studies and is the inaugural Helen and Morgan Chu Endowed Director’s Chair of the Asian American Studies Center. Professor Umemoto received her Ph.D. in Urban Studies from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and holds a M.A. in Asian American Studies from UCLA and a B.A. in Interdisciplinary Social Science from San Francisco State University.
Professor Umemoto’s research and practice take a broad view of planning in the context of social inclusion, participatory democracy, and political transformation. She has published over 50 articles, book chapters, and professional reports, and she has served on the boards for the Association for Asian American Studies and the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning. She has also served on editorial boards for five journals, including the Journal of the American Planning Association. In 2001, she received the University of Hawai’i Regents Medal for Excellence in Teaching. She is the recipient of the W.E.B. DuBois Award of the Western Society of Criminology, co-author of Jacked Up and Unjust: Pacific Islander Teens Confront Violent Legacies (University of California Press, 2016), and the author of Truce: Lessons from an L.A. Gang War (Cornell University Press, 2006).
Dr. Kelly Fong
Project Co-Director
Kelly Fong (she/her) is a Continuing Lecturer in Asian American Studies at UCLA. She holds a Ph.D. and M.A. in Archaeology with a graduate concentration in Asian American Studies from UCLA and a B.A. in Anthropology with a minor in Asian American Studies from UC Berkeley. Dr. Fong is an award-winning teacher who has taught undergraduate and graduate students across Southern California for over a decade and was the first lecturer to receive the UCLA Asian American Studies Center’s C. Doris and Toshio Hoshide Distinguished Teaching Prize in Asian American Studies in 2022.
Dr. Fong’s interdisciplinary research bridges Asian American social histories, community-based histories, and historical archaeology to examine everyday life through materials and memories left behind. Her work has been featured in numerous media outlets including the HBO series “Take Out with Lisa Ling” (2022), VoyageLA, podcasts such as Asian Americana, Asian American History 101, and The Ken Fong Podcast. She serves as an Associate Editor for Historical Archaeology for California Archaeology, and the Asian American and Pacific Islander Taskforce Lead for the Coalition for Diversity in California Archaeology, a committee for the Society for California Archaeology.