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Research and Scholarship

Congratulations to Professor Sameer Pandya for the publication of his new book!

From The Current's profile of the book:

"In 'Our Beautiful Boys' (Ballantine, 2025), Pandya, an associate professor at UC Santa Barbara, frames his narrative around a central ambiguity inspired by E.M. Forster's 'A Passage to India,' where an incident in a cave leaves questions of truth unanswered. He transplants that uncertainty to contemporary California, intertwining race, privilege and passing--both racial and social--into a story that ripples outward through families and frienships."

Read more of The Current's profile here!

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Congratulations to Professor Lisa S. Park for the publication of her new book!

From the publisher’s summary: The United States’ health care system not only consists of a formal safety net, but also an informal and disjointed network of organizations that offer basic care to millions of migrants. This “Third Net” provides free or low-cost health care for the undocumented, low-income, and uninsured migrants who are excluded from the formal system. This groundbreaking study sheds light on the existence of the Third Net and its implications for the overall inequalities in the US health care system.

 

Department Spotlight

Our department would like to give a special shout out to one of our majors, Felix Dong, for publishing his opinion piece This Can’t Keep Happening: Anti-Asian Incidents in the The Bottom Line (March 3, 2022), UCSB's student-run newspaper.

In his article, Felix discusses how traumatic the rise in anti-Asian incidents have been on the Asian American community in the wake of the covid-19 pandemic. He goes on to describe anti-Asian hate crimes in recent history, both in the US and on the UCSB campus. For these reasons, Felix argues, "[w]e cannot keep hearing these names on the news, sending our prayers, and continuing this cycle." He encourages his readers to take action, from calling their representatives to volunteering with community organizations. Most importantly, he argues, we must "spread awareness and talk about what is happening...We must talk about racism and address it, however uncomfortable it may be. These uncomfortable conversations mean addressing our own internal bias, vulnerabilities, and trauma but are also an opportunity for us to come together as a community."

Thank you, Felix, for your illuminating article! We hope it drives more community members to have difficult conversations and take action against anti-Asian hate.