CSRPC: Directory: 2004-2005 Resident Fellows
Tatsu Aoki, Visiting Professor
Anne M. Martínez, Post-Doctoral Fellow
Tracye A. Matthews, Visiting Teaching Fellow
Natsu Onoda, Chicago Artist-in-Residence
Mark Rifkin, Visiting Teaching Fellow
Phyllis West, Dissertation Fellow
Tatsu Aoki, visiting professor of music
and associate professor of film at the School of the Art Institute, Chicago,
is one of the most recorded, talked-about bassists on the Chicago music
scene. A prolific artist, composer, musician, educator, and a consummate
bassist, he works in a wide range of musical styles, ranging from traditional
Asian music and jazz, to creative free and experimental music. Aoki is founder
and artistic director of the Chicago Asian American Jazz Festival, which
debuted in October 1996 and has had seven successful seasons. Currently
national in scope, the annual event is now known as Asian American Jazz.
Aoki has over 30 recordings to his name—some solos, duets, trios,
and larger ensembles. ROOTED: Origins of Now, a four-suite, approximately
50-minute piece that combines ancient Japanese music and experimental American
jazz, is one of his most prolific pieces. Other important titles include
The MIYUMI Project and Basser Live. A Symphony of Cities;
TRIO, with Robbie Lynn Hunsinger and Joseph Jarman; and Posture
of Reality, a duet work with East Coast–based artist Wu Man,
are among his latest works.
Anne M. Martínez, Postdoctoral Fellow, is assistant professor of history and Latina/Latino studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She is currently revising her manuscript Bordering on the Sacred: Religion, Nation and U.S.-Mexican Relations, 1910–1929, which analyzes the role of religion in U.S.-Mexican relations during the Mexican Revolution. Her most recent research examines how labor and religion shaped the Mexican experience of race in 1920s Chicago. Her other research interests include Chicana labor, Latina/o Chicago, the Virgin of Guadalupe, and Latina feminist thought. Her publications include “Mexican Revolution, Lucy Parsons, and Luisa Moreno,” in Encyclopedia of Latinos and Latinas in the United States, ed. Deena Gonzalez and Suzanne Oboler (London: Oxford University Press, forthcoming); and “‘From the Halls of Montezuma’: Seminary in Exile or Pan-American Project?” in U.S. Catholic Historian 20, no. 4 (Fall 2002). Martínez earned her Ph.D. in American studies from the University of Minnesota in 2003.
Tracye A. Matthews, Visiting Teaching Fellow, is a historian of African American history. Most recently, she was the media curator for the Teen Chicago Project at the Chicago Historical Society (CHS). In 2003 she curated Harold Washington: The Man and the Movement, a major exhibition at CHS commemorating the twentieth anniversary of the election of Chicago’s first black mayor. Her involvement in documentary film and video projects includes work at the award-winning ROJA Productions, where she was the senior researcher for the PBS series Matters of Race, associate producer and co-writer of a ten-part video installation for the National Civil Rights Museum, and producer for project development for the American Experience’s Citizen King. Matthews was previously an assistant professor in the Department of Africana Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Her work has been published in numerous anthologies and journals including Race and Class, Sisters in Struggle: African American Women in the Civil Rights–Black Power Movement, and The Black Panther Party Reconsidered. She is currently writing a book on the gender and sexual politics of the Black Panther Party. She received her Ph.D. in American history from the University of Michigan–Ann Arbor.
Natsu Onoda, Chicago Artist-in-Residence, is the co-founder/artistic director of Live Action Cartoonists (LAC), a Chicago-based performance group that combines cartooning and live multimedia theater. She wrote, directed, and designed two productions with LAC, SCIENCE (FICTION) (Guling Street Avant-Garde Theatre, Taipei) and are you my negative space?: a performance about comics, war and love (Athenaeum Theatre, Chicago). Her favorite set design credits include Romeo and Juliet at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater, Burnt Rice at the Eslite Art Center (Taipei), Loss of Breath at Theatre X (Milwaukee), and most recently Antigone at the Loop Theatre (with greasy joan & company) in September 2004. Natsu holds a scenic painting certificate from the Yale School of Drama and expects to receive her Ph.D. in performance studies from Northwestern University in December 2004. Her scholarly work on comics has been published in the International Journal of Comic Art.
Mark Rifkin, Visiting Teaching Fellow, recently received his Ph.D. in English from the University of Pennsylvania. During his residency he will be working on two book-length studies. The first traces the imperial force of representations of national space in the antebellum United States and examines how displaced populations asserted their own geographies and identities in a variety of nonfictional writings. The other addresses the role that discourses of sexuality have played in the expropriation of Native American land and labor and the ways native writers have defended traditional kinship and residency against this ostensibly civilizing onslaught. His essay “Representing the Cherokee Nation: Subaltern Studies and Native American Sovereignty” is forthcoming in Boundary 2. His teaching interests include nineteenth-century American writing, Native American studies, law and literature, and contemporary queer literature and politics.
Phyllis West, Dissertation Fellow, is currently a Ph.D.
candidate in social work at the School of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago.
Her dissertation research explores the relationship between incarcerated
African American mothers and maternal grandmothers. Additional research
interests are in women’s health, HIV/AIDS, substance abuse, and community
participatory action research. She has 14 years of professional experience
in maternal and child health in the areas of health planning, health education,
and mental health. She has worked with individuals, families, children,
communities, faith-based institutions, local and federal governments, and
private health facilities on behavioral and public health issues (e.g.,
substance abuse, women’s health, HIV/AIDS, violence, and depression).
She is a certified yoga instructor and a former Peace Corps volunteer who
served in Liberia and Sierra Leone, West Africa.
