People

Cindy Mata

Cindy Mata is a proud Guanaca, who was born in El Salvador and moved to the U.S. as a young child. She is a proud community college transfer student who received an undergraduate degree in Chican@ Studies from U.C. Santa Barbara. After graduating from UC Santa Barbara’s Teacher Education Program and earning a Masters in Education, she became a history teacher in LAUSD and taught in East and South L.A. before returning to her home district of West Covina Unified as a teacher and later an instructional coach in history education. It was important for Cindy to give back to the community in which she grew up. Cindy has taught all secondary history courses from seventh to twelfth grade, including courses in the International Baccalaureate Diploma Programmes, AP, and credit recovery. Her time in the classroom helped her understand all secondary standards for history/ social studies as well as how to meet the needs of all types of learners.

She was previously the Associate Director of the UCLA History Geography Project (UCLA-HGP). She led the Ethnic Studies work at UCLA-HGP and helped lead ethnic studies initiatives within the California History Social Science Project (CHSSP) and across the California Subject Matter Projects (CSMP). While at UCLA, she also spent time learning with and from in-service elementary teachers and together they explored the intersections of elementary social science and ethnic studies in primary grades. This work helped prepare Cindy to teach the methods course for elementary history/social science in the Teacher Education Program at UCLA.

Cindy is a life-long learner and is always looking to grow in her praxis. As such, she went back to school and earned a Masters in Latin American Studies from CSU, Los Angeles. Her research focuses on how to best infuse Central American Studies in K-12 classrooms. Cindy is excited to create a caring community for history and ethnic studies teachers in Orange County.

Mariana Ramirez
Associate Director
mariaer3@uci.edu
Mariana E. Ramírez is an Associate Director for the UCI History Project, focused on building collaborative networks between ethnic studies scholars, K-12 teachers, and their students in a meaningful study of local history through an ethnic studies methodology and pedagogy. She worked as a middle and high school teacher in the immigrant communities of Barrio Logan in San Diego and Boyle Heights in Los Angeles for 13 years. An important part of her work is engaging with students in geospatial community action research projects and serving as an advisor for student social justice organizations. She is currently doctoral student part of the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies in the Urban Schooling Division. Her research agenda lies at the intersections of ethnic studies pedagogy, critical geographies, and documenting local histories of joy and resistance of people of color via oral histories and archival research.

Emilee Ramirez
Graduate Student Researcher
emilleer@uci.edu
Emilee Ramirez is a PhD student in the Department of History at UC Irvine. Her areas of focus are 20th century U.S. History, metropolitan history, and Native American Studies. Emilee has taught courses at the collegiate level where she also worked with colleagues in creating innovative pedagogical approaches to teaching history and bridging secondary and post-secondary teaching and learning goals to strengthen pathways to higher education. She received her M.A. from California State University San Marcos, where she was awarded the History Department’s Outstanding Thesis Award in 2019.

Samantha Engler
Administrative Analyst
englers@uci.edu
Samantha Engler is the Academic Personnel Analyst in the Department of History at UC Irvine. She also provides administrative assistance, such as workshop registration, website maintenance, and reimbursement process, for the UCI History Project. Samantha earned a B.A. in History at UC Irvine in 2016, where she studied modern US cultural history. especially histories of media and student activism.

Laura J. Mitchell
Faculty Advisor
mitchell@uci.edu
Laura is a historian the of early-modern world with a particular interest in colonial South Africa. She’s written about enslaved agricultural laborers and communities of runaways, land tenure and environmental resource use, colonial households, and the production of knowledge about Africa in western universities and museums. In both her research and her teaching, she’s committed to making sense of early-modern societies in a digital age, making history accessible to diverse audiences, and exploring digital platforms to accomplish those goals. She has prioritized conversations and collaborations with K-12 and college-level teachers throughout her career, working with the College Board’s AP World History course and exam, the OER Project’s world history course, the Online Conference for Social Studies, and—closest to her heart—UCI’s History Project, where she’s been a regular presenter for the past two decades. She served as president of the World History Association as a Provost’s Teaching Fellow at UCI. Her research received award from Fulbright, the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Mellon Foundation.

Professor Judy Wu Judy Wu
Faculty Advisor
j.wu@uci.edu
Judy Tzu-Chun Wu is a professor of History and Asian American Studies at the University of California, Irvine. She also serves as faculty director of the Humanities Center and Associate Dean in the School of Humanities of Research, Faculty Development, and Public Engagement. She received her Ph.D. in U.S. History from Stanford University. She authored Dr. Mom Chung of the Fair-Haired Bastards: the Life of a Wartime Celebrity (University of California Press, 2005) and Radicals on the Road: Internationalism, Orientalism, and Feminism during the Vietnam Era (Cornell University Press, 2013). Her book, Fierce and Fearless: Patsy Takemoto Mink, First Woman of Color in Congress (New York University Press, 2022), is a collaboration with political scientist Gwendolyn Mink. Wu is currently working on a book that focuses on Asian American and Pacific Islander Women who attended the 1977 National Women’s Conference and co-editing Unequal Sisters, 5th edition with Routledge Press. She also is co-editor of Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000 (Alexander Street Press) and is the co-president of the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians.