Dr. Maulana Karenga is a professor in the Department of Africana Studies. On January 6^th, 2011, he presented his paper “Reaffirmation and Renewal in Black Studies: Framework for an Ongoing Initiative” at the State of African American and Diaspora Studies: Methodology, Pedagogy and Research Conference. In addition, Dr. Karenga gave a Martin Luther King, Jr. Day lecture, “King and the Psychology of Freedom: Self-Respect, Resistance and Resilience,” to the Association for the Study of Classical African Civilization on January 13^th, 2011. He lectured on “Towards a Culturally Grounded African American HIV/AIDS Strategy: Obstacles, Essentials and Possibilities” at the NIMH-sponsored UCLA Conference on Health, Hope and Healing (H3): A National Conference on HIV among Black MSM and MSMW on January 31 ^th, 2011. He presented a lecture-discussion on “The Black HIV/AIDS Crisis: Towards an Ethics of Care and Active Commitment” before the Augustana Lutheran Church and Lutheran Campus Ministry in Chicago on February 8^th, 2011.

Dr. John Jung is a Professor Emeritus of the Department of Psychology. He presented talks to the Honors Program at the University of Memphis on his book Southern Fried Rice, to a general audience on the “History of Chinese in the South During the Jim Crow Era,” and to the fifth-grade students of the Campus School on “What Your History Books Left Out About the History of Chinese in America”. This latter talk took place on September 12^th, 2011, and was sponsored by the Confucius Institute. In addition, he gave a talk, “On Being Chinese Where Everyone Else is Either Black or White,” to the Department of Sociology/Anthropology at the University of Mississippi in Oxford on September 15^th, 2011, gave an interview on Mississippi Public Radio about Delta Chinese grocers, and held a conversation hour, “Beyond Black and White: The Chinese American Experience,” at Delta State University in Cleveland, Mississippi, on September 20^th, 2011. He presented his talk “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Retirement” at the Signal Hill Community Center on September 26^th, 2011, as well as at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia on September 29^th, 2011. This last event was sponsored by the APA Historical Society, the U.S. China People’s Friendship Association, and the National Association of Chinese Americans. He gave an interview on Atlanta NPR on September 29^th, 2011. During his interview, Dr. Jung addressed the long-term harm of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and the significance of an official apology from the U.S. government. Moreover, he spoke on a Creative Nonfiction panel and at a book signing for Southern Fried Rice at the Crossroads Writers Conference and Literary Festival, which was held in Macon, Georgia on October 1^st -2^nd, 2011. He also presented “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Retirement: How A Psychologist Morphed into A Historian of Chinese America” to the Alumni Association and Association of Emeriti at CSULB on October 21^st, 2011.

Boak Ferris is a professor in the Departments of English and Comparative World Literature and Classics. He authored and published a textbook, Write Well, Write Fast: 20 Techniques of Professional Writing, which is suitable for graduate students, pre-professionals, and entry-level white-collar workers.

Dr. Brett Mizelle of the Department of History recently published his book Pig.

The following is the “Product Description” on Amazon.com:

“Known as much for their pink curly tails and pudgy snouts as their low-brow choice of diet and habitat, pigs are prevalent in popular culture—from the Three Little Pigs to Miss Piggy to Babe. Today there are more than one billion pigs on the planet, and there are countless representations of pigs and piggishness throughout the world’s cultures.

In Pig, Brett Mizelle provides a richly illustrated and compelling look at the long, complicated relationship between humans and these highly intelligent, sociable animals. Mizelle traces the natural and cultural history of the pig, focusing on the contradictions between our imaginative representation of pigs and the real-world truth of the ways in which pigs are prized for their meat, used as subjects in medical research, and killed in order to make hundreds of consumer products. Pig begins with the evolution of the suidae, animals that were domesticated in multiple regions 9,000 years ago, and points toward a future where pigs and humans are even more closely intertwined as a result of biomedical breakthroughs. Pig both examines the widespread art, entertainment, and literature that imagines human kinship with pigs and the development of modern industrial pork production.

In charting how humans have shaped the pig and how the pig has shaped us, Mizelle focuses on the unresolved contradictions between the fiction and the reality of our relations with pigs.”

Professor Tim Keirn of the Department of History and Dr. Norbert Schürer of the Department of English recently published the book British Encounters with India, 1750-1830: A Sourcebook.

 Professor Keirn is a full-time lecturer in the Departments of History and Liberal Studies. His research, scholarship, and teaching efforts focus upon history education (with an emphasis in world history) and eighteenth-century British economic history.

 Dr. Schürer is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English. His scholarly interests include eighteenth-century British literature, literary theory, women writers, book history, and post-colonial literature.

Dr. Jeffrey High recently published the book Who Is This Schiller Now?: Essays on His Reception and Significance.

Dr. High is a Professor of German in CSULB’s Department of Romance, German, Russian Languages and Literatures. He also serves as the Director of the German Studies Program and Graduate Advisor. Dr. High’s teaching and research focus on the “Age of Schiller” as well as literary, philosophical, and theoretical texts from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. His seminars— “Friedrich Schiller,” “The ‘German’ Novella from Boccaccio to Stephen King,” “Heinrich von Kleist,” and “Drama of the Late Enlightenment”—teach interdisciplinary approaches to the intersections of literature, philosophy, critical theory, and politics in German, European, and US culture. He has received numerous awards for teaching, service, and scholarship, and has taught as a Visiting Professor at the University of New Mexico German Summer School since 2001.

Dr. Carl Lipo recently published the book The Statues that Walked: Unraveling the Mystery of Easter Island.

Dr. Lipo is a Professor of Anthropology at California State University, Long Beach. His research focuses on the use of evolutionary theory to generate scientific explanations about human cultural change in the archaeological record.