Diane C. Fujino

Diane C. Fujino's research and teaching interests center on Asian American social movements, Japanese American radicalism, Afro-Asian solidarities, race and gender studies, and biography and oral history. Her study of legendary activist Yuri Kochiyama developed into the first biography of an Asian American woman activist, Heartbeat of Struggle: The Revolutionary Life of Yuri Kochiyama (Minnesota Press, 2005), and a gendered analysis of leadership in an essay in Want to Start a Revolution: Radical Women in the Black Freedom Struggle. Her edited book, Wicked Theory, Naked Practice (Minnesota Press, 2009), examines the Afro-Asian influences on the music and Left politics of Fred Ho. Fujino's current project, Samurai Among Panthers, studies the life of Richard Aoki, a leader of the Black Panther Party, Third World strike at UC Berkeley, and Asian American Political Alliance. She published the first historiography of Asian American social movement studies in The Journal of Asian American Studies (2008). She has also published essays in a range of scholarly and activist journals and anthologies, including Social Justice, Journal of Men's Studies, AFRO/ASIA, Teaching Asian America, Dragon Ladies, andLegacy to Liberation.

Fujino is associate professor and chairof Asian American studies and an affiliate faculty member of Black studies at UC Santa Barbara. Before coming to UCSB, she earned her Ph.D. in psychology from UCLA, was an Institute of American Cultures postdoctoral fellow at UCLA Asian American studies, and a postdoctoral fellow at the National Research Center on Asian American Mental Heath. 

Fujino teaches courses on the Asian American Movement, Third World social movements, Japanese American history, Asian American gender and sexuality, Asian Americans and the Black radical imagination, and a freshman seminar on Yuri Kochiyama. She initiated the Community Studies and Peer Advising programs in Asian American studies at UCSB and also taught an experimental high school outreach course on Puerto Rican history and resistance, in conjunction with the art exhibit, "Not Enough Space," exhibited at La Casa de la Raza in Santa Barbara. She serves on the Board of the MultiCultural Center and the Chancellor's Outreach Advisory Board at UCSB as well as the Scholars Committee of the Japanese American National Museum. She was featured in "AOKI: A Documentary Film," was invited to give the keynote address before the first-year and transfer student class at the 2009 New Student Convocation, and speaks on Asian American resistance and Afro-Asian politics and broadly on education, political prisoners, and activism.