We're excited to announce this year's elected members, who will serve three-year terms from July 1, 2025, to June 30, 2028:

President

President-Elect 2025-2026; President 2026-2027; Immediate Past-President 2027-2028

Tanisha C. Ford, CUNY Graduate Center

Tanisha C. Ford is a professor of History; Black, Race & Ethnic Studies; and Biography & Memoir at The Graduate Center, CUNY. Holding a Ph.D. in twentieth-century U.S. history with expertise in African diaspora history and transnational American studies, Ford is an interdisciplinary historian whose research examines African diasporic social movements, material and visual cultures, critical philanthropic studies, and life writing. The author of four books, including Our Secret Society: Mollie Moon and the Glamour, Money, and Power Behind the Civil Rights Movement, which received multiple awards, Ford has published work in both academic journals and major media outlets. Their research has been supported by institutions such as the Harvard Radcliffe Institute and the Ford Foundation.

Nominating Committee

Jorge Cuéllar, Dartmouth College

Jorge Cuéllar is an American Studies scholar at Dartmouth College whose research focuses on Central America’s transnational and diasporic politics, culture, and history. His work, published in both academic and public venues, examines topics such as migration, extractivism, money culture, and authoritarianism, and he is currently completing his first book, Everyday Life and Everyday Death in El Salvador. At Dartmouth, he coordinates the Latinx Studies Working Group, leads the Central America Project, and serves as Faculty Director for the CASA-Cuba Exchange Program.

Rosie Jayde Uyola, Bard College

Rosie Jayde Uyola is an Assistant Professor of History and Literature at Bard High School Early College-Bronx, where they are a founding faculty member. They currently serve as president of the New York and Eastern Regional Chapter of the American Studies Association (ASA). As a scholar of American Studies, their research explores public memory and commemoration, the Black Freedom Movement, oral history, and K-16 education. Dr. Uyola's current project investigates the opportunities and challenges of school desegregation in fostering equitable communities in Central Harlem and the South Bronx, NYC.

National Council

Lisa Bhungalia, University of Wisconsin

Lisa Bhungalia is an Assistant Professor of Geography and International Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and core faculty in the Middle East Studies Program. Bhungalia's research examines evolving modalities of late-modern war, empire, and transnational linkages between the US and Southwest Asian and North African region. Their first book, Elastic Empire: Refashioning War through Aid in Palestine, traces the deepening entanglements of aid, law, and war in Palestine with attention to the surveillance and policing regimes produced through the embedding of US counterterrorism laws and infrastructures into aid flows.

Angelica Camacho, San Francisco State University

Angelica Camacho is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Criminal Justice Studies at San Francisco State University. Her intellectual work aims to shift the dominant narratives of criminality that target and scapegoat communities of color into counter-hegemonic narratives that highlight social struggles for life and liberation. Her current research documents the 2011 and 2013 Pelican Bay California Prisoner Hunger Strikes and the subsequent uprising of their families in protest to the conditions of confinement in Security Housing Units (SHU).

Tala Khanmalek, Independent Scholar/California State Fullerton

Tala Khanmalek is a writer, activist, and associate professor of gender and sexuality studies at CSU Fullerton where she is affiliated with ethnic studies. Khanmalek's research engages public health and other archives with queer, disabled, and feminist of color epistemologies, as well as oral histories that she conducts with relatives, organizers, and healing justice practitioners. Her current research includes forthcoming writings on relational racialization and the (anti)imperial intimacies between the SWANA region and Oceania; TWLF and Palestine solidarity; a Creative Capital Award-winning book project on queer of color disability; and a co-edited special issue of Palimpsest on Black feminist author Gayl Jones.

Hannah Manshel, University of Hawai‘i, Mānoa

Hannah Manshel is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Hawaiʻi, Mānoa. Her research focuses on race and colonialism in US law. Her book, Spirits Before the Law: Faith, Race and Freedom Beyond Property, which is currently under review at Duke University Press, pairs early- and nineteenth-century American texts with contemporary media to trace the enduring legacy of how people have turned to faith, broadly defined, to undermine a US legal system founded upon slavery and settler colonialism. She regularly teaches courses in queer and trans literary studies, Indigenous and decolonial literature and theory, and specializes in American literature before 1900.

Victoria Reyes, University of California, Riverside

Victoria Reyes is an Associate Professor in the Department of Gender & Sexuality Studies at the University of California, Riverside. Trained as a sociologist, her research agenda reveals how structures of power and everyday life embodiment and experiences of inequalities and violences are intertwined. Her first book, Global Borderlands: Fantasy, Violence, and Empire in Subic Bay, Philippines (2019) examines how legal ambiguity and power are negotiated, contested, adapted, and transformed in semi-autonomous spaces (such as military bases, tourist resorts, special economic zones, embassies, and the like) across domains: from military agreements and criminal trials to sexual relationships and the plight of Amerasian children, to work and consumption.  

National Council Student Member

Dalena Ngô, Yale University

Dalena Ngô is a graduate student in the History of Science and Medicine at Yale University. She did her undergraduate work at St. Olaf College in Biology and American Studies and received a masters at the University of California, Merced in Critical Race and Ethnic Studies. Her research includes abolitionist university studies, university governance, and institutional politics of care. Her current project traces the evolution of the neoliberal university and its transformation into academic health centers that are imbricated in the provision of reproductive and LGBTQ+ care, the importance of healthcare equity, and concerns around academic freedom and shared governance.

We also want to recognize and thank those who have dedicated their time and effort as they complete their terms on June 30, 2025:

Executive Committee

• Wendy Cheng, University of Southern California
• Monica Huerta, Princeton University
• Elliott Powell, University of Minnesota
• Sharon P. Holland, Immediate Past President, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

National Council

• Yomaira Figueroa-Vásquez, Michigan State University
• Mimi Thi Nguyen, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
• Olivia Polk, Student Representative, Yale University

Nominating Committee

• Tao Leigh Goffe, Hunter College, CUNY Shanté Paradigm Smalls, New York University