Crystal Mun-hye Baik, an associate professor of gender and sexuality studies, has received a $300,000 fellowship from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. 

The fellowship is part of Mellon’s New Directions program, which assists faculty members in the humanities and social sciences in attaining their PhDs and acquiring training outside their disciplines. Fellowships include one year’s salary; two summers of additional support; and tuition or course fees for the fellow’s training program. 

The fellowship will allow Baik to complete graduate-level coursework at UCLA’s Department of Information Studies, with a focus on archival and preservation studies. She will study archival and preservation efforts related to Asian diasporic, refugee, and migrant communities impacted by war, militarism, and carceral violence.

“At a moment characterized by catastrophic erasure on a planetary scale, community archives and memory preservation efforts stewarded by displaced peoples are more necessary than ever,” Baik wrote in her fellowship proposal, which alluded to a lack of Asian American archival studies scholars in the U.S.

The fellowship will also support Baik’s plans to work with UCR’s Memory & Resistance Laboratory to design a new feminist archival and memory studies course within the Department of Gender and Sexuality Studies, which is housed in the College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences.

“Given UCR’s location in the Inland Empire — a region with prominent Indigenous, immigrant, and incarcerated populations, and an area disproportionately impacted by wildfires and other climate changes — such a course would explicitly tackle some of the most urgent challenges we are now facing on a local and planetary scale, while also foregrounding how peoples have always cared for, stewarded, and imaginatively preserved their histories and cultural practices,” Baik wrote in her proposal.

Baik is the author of the 2019 book, “Reencounters: On the Korean War and Diasporic Memory Critique,” published by Temple University Press.

With an endowment of $7.9 billion, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation is the nation’s largest private source of arts, culture, and humanities funding in the United States.