Dr. Rossina Zamora Liu to Serve on AFS Executive Board

The Executive Board of the American Folklore Society is pleased to announce that Dr. Rossina Zamora Liu has agreed to serve on the Board 2022-24. 

Every three years, the Board has the opportunity and responsibility to elect a new member to ensure that the Board better represents the current interests of the AFS membership.

Rossina brings wide-ranging experience in teaching, research, and community-based projects, with particular expertise in issues of inclusion, diversity, equity, access/accountability, and sustainability, as well as Asian American and Vietnamese American community truths and knowledge-making through storytelling and stories. She is on the faculty in Urban Education and division coordinator of Education Policy and Leadership at the University of Maryland. 

She is an invaluable connector between the fields of folklore and other disciplines, especially education and writing. She is steeped in knowledge of critical race theory and decolonial thought in education, bringing a lens of race and equity to every project, her own scholarship, and any policy questions before her. As a 1.5-generation, multi-ethnic Asian American and a non-Black Critical Race educator, she has worked with artists, film-makers, and b-boys on community-based projects; first-generation college student-athletes; middle/high-school students in urban/rural communities, and veterans at homeless shelters, the Veterans Affairs Medical Center, and community settings. Her research focuses on interrogating systems of white supremacy and anti-blackness in education, counter-storytelling, and cross-racial solidarity and coalition building. 

She is co-author of a forthcoming book Systems of White Supremacy and White Privilege: A Racial-Spatial Framework for Psychology (Oxford University Press) and a guest co-editor of two journal special issues: “Anti-Blackness in English Curriculum, Practice, and Culture” in English Teaching: Practice & Critique (fall 2021), and “Race(ing) towards Futurity: Black and Latinx Youths’ Multimodal Compositions of Future Selves and Literacies” in International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education (forthcoming/fall 2022). She currently serves on the Local Learning Editorial Board for the Journal of Folklore and Education and is the incoming elected secretary/treasurer of the American Educational Research Association’s special interest group, “Critical Examination of Race, Ethnicity, Class, and Gender.”

She received  the 2016 J. Michael Parker Award (Literacy Research Association), the 2021 College of Education Excellence in Teaching Award (UMD) and the 2017 Distinguished Educator Award (UIowa). 

She has an MFA from the Iowa Nonfiction Writing Program and a PhD in Language, Literacy, and Culture, both from the University of Iowa.