CSRPC: Directory: 2003-2004 Resident Fellows

George Anthony Peffer, Redfield Professor

Bibiana Suarez, Chicago Artist-in-Residence

George Anthony Peffer, Robert Redfield Visiting Professor, is chair of the Division of Social Sciences and associate professor of history at Lakeland College. He received his Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University. His research and teaching are devoted to the Asian American experience. Both his article “Forbidden Families: Immigration Experiences of Chinese Women under the Page Law, 1875–1882,” and his book If They Don’t Bring Their Women Here: Chinese Female Immigration before Exclusion are considered standard texts for many Asian American studies and Asian American history courses. His current book project will provide an extensive investigation of the evolution of family life in San Francisco’s Chinese American community from 1852 to 1943.

Patrick Rivers, Postdoctoral Fellow, is assistant professor of American ethnic studies and law, societies, and justice at the University of Washington. He received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. During his residency at the Center, he will be completing a book on the regulation of race and hate in the United States. According to Rivers, “This project is about state regulation of racial hatred in general and racial hate speech in particular.” The work is a comparative study of the United States and South Africa. His publications include “Complicating Identity, Naturalizing Equality: The Politics of Hate Regulation in South Africa and the United States” and “Governable Images: Censorship and Racial Constructs in Late-Apartheid South Africa.”

Bibiana Suarez, Chicago Artist-in-Residence, is chair of the Department of Art and Art History and associate professor of art at DePaul University. She is also a gifted, Chicago-based studio artist. She received her M.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where her primary concentration was painting and drawing. Her exhibitions include Domino/Dominó at El Museo del Barrio, New York, and at the State of Illinois Art Gallery, Chicago, and De Pico a Pico (Beak to Beak—Face to Face), Sazama Gallery, Chicago. While in residence at the Center, she will be working on a new installation that will explore the “tropicalization” and “latinization” of U.S. culture. The working title of the project is Memoria.

Yvonne Welbon, visiting assistant professor of cinema and media studies, is an award-winning independent filmmaker. She has created over a dozen award-winning works that have been screened on public television, cable and in film festivals around the world. Her film Living With Pride: Ruth Ellis @ 100 (1999) has been screened in over 150 venues around the world and won ten best documentary awards.
Welbon received her Ph.D. from Northwestern University. Her films work to create a stronger media presence for African American women. Her current projects include a documentary entitled Sisters in Cinema; a book based on her doctoral dissertation; a Web site about the history of African American women feature film directors, and Where Are We Now, a magazine-style documentary series that examines pivotal points in history that were spearheaded by black women and that brought about social, political, cultural, economic, and technological changes in the world.

Ellen Wu, Dissertation Fellow, is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at the University of Chicago, where her primary field is twentieth-century United States history. She received her M.A. in Asian American studies from the University of California, Los Angeles. Past fellowships and grants include the University of Chicago Century Fellowship, 1999–2003. The title of her dissertation is “Yellow Perils, Yellow Power: Race, Class, and Asian American Citizenship, 1941–1975.” Her research interests are society and politics in twentieth-century United States, race, class, citizenship, and international relations.