Wednesday 16 July 2025
Global Arts, Media, and Writing Studies
School of Social Sciences, Humanities, and Arts
At UC Merced, Dr. Camfield leads a research group dedicated to exploring strategies for developing student resilience in the face of compounding adversities. She also has general research interests in pedagogy and administration. (Since 1997, she has served as an instructor, curriculum designer, and faculty pedagogy coordinator. She spent five years as director of a university writing program and subsequently worked as the Executive Director of Student Academic Success Services.) Eileen’s abiding commitment to advancing equity, diversity and inclusion connects with her primary research interests pertaining to student success, writing self-efficacy development, anti-racist pedagogy, and authentic assessment.
Art & Architectural History/Visual Culture
School of Social Sciences, Humanities, and Arts
Aditi Chandra teaches art history at the University of California, Merced and specializes in the Islamic world, with a focus on South Asia. Her research shows how, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, physical transformations and subaltern actors disrupting statist narratives rendered the monument unruly even as the State attempted to order it. Her book Unruly Monuments: Disrupting the State at Delhi’s Islamic Architecture is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press. She is co-editor (with Vinita Chandra) of Nations and its Margins: Re-thinking Community (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2019). She has curated exhibitions showcasing colonial visual travel ephemera.
Global Arts, Media, and Writing Studies
School of Social Sciences, Humanities, and Arts
Paul Gibbons focuses teaching and creative time on implementing creative writing pedagogy, gathering data on and strategizing for teaching multilingual first-year writers, and synthesizing approaches to disciplinary and interdisciplinary writing.
Global Arts, Media, and Writing Studies
School of Social Sciences, Humanities, and Arts
An Assistant Teaching Professor in Writing Studies, Dr. Emily Rónay Johnston (she/her/hers) researches the relationship between writing, trauma, and resilience. Dr. Emily has published on writing about adversity and on teaching writing about adversity, in College Composition and Communication (2023), Writers: Craft & Context (2022), Rhetoric of Health and Medicine (2020), and elsewhere, and in the edited collections Systems Shift: Creating and Navigating Change in Rhetoric and Composition Administration (2023) and Composing Feminist Interventions: Activism, Engagement, Praxis (2018) published by University Press of Colorado.
Writing Studies
School of Social Sciences, Humanities, and Arts
Samantha Tetangco Ocena (she/her) is an Associate Teaching Professor in Writing Studies where she teaches creative writing, first-year writing, and professional writing with a focus on sound and audio storytelling, collaborative storytelling, and anti-racist pedagogy. She received her BA from UC Berkeley and her MFA, with Distinction, from the University of New Mexico. Her poetry, short stories, and creative nonfiction have appeared in dozens of literary magazines, and her first collection of poetry, Hope You Blend In: Studies in Color & Light (Broadstone Books, 2024) was a finalist for the 2023 National Poetry Series Prize.
Global Arts, Media, and Writing Studies
School of Social Sciences, Humanities, and Arts
Since joining UC Merced in 2007, she has been active in the Writing Studies Minor, including founding the UC Merced Creative Writing Collaboratorium, a multi-campus conference, and curating the Write! Look! Listen! reading and workshop series. She has also been active in general education, assessment and review processes, the UC Merced Undergraduate Research Journal, student clubs and events, as well as other campus initiatives and projects. These areas of engagement and inquiry stem from her teaching and research interests in collaborative, integrative, and empowering pedagogy and praxis, creative writing, interdisciplinarity, poetry, and creativity studies. Her poems have appeared in numerous publications, including journals such as Arts and Letters, Spoon River Poetry Review, Cimarron Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, and in the anthology, A Face to Meet the Faces: Contemporary Persona Poetry.
Global Arts, Media, and Writing Studies
School of Social Sciences, Humanities, and Arts
ShiPu Wang is the Coats Family Chair in the Arts and professor of art history at UC Merced. His scholarship has centered around rediscovering and reevaluating the work and legacy of diasporic American artists of Asian descent in the first half of the twentieth century, during the Exclusion Era. An awards-winning author of four books and numerous journal articles, Dr. Wang has also curated two internationally and nationally touring art exhibitions: Chiura Obata: An American Modern (2018–2020), and Pictures of Belonging: Miki Hayakawa, Hisako Hibi, and Miné Okubo (2024–2027). Dr. Wang has served on the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery’s Board of Commissioners, the editorial board of the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s academic journal, American Art, and as a Terra Foundation Senior Fellow at both the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Brooklyn Museum of Art.
Global Arts, Media, and Writing Studies
School of Social Sciences, Humanities, and Arts
Yiran Xu is an Assistant Professor of Writing Studies. Her research interests include multilingual writing, second language acquisition and bilingualism, corpus linguistics, and writing assessment. She used mixed-methods approaches to understand how multilingual learners develop writing and language skills over time across various contexts.
