Graduate Student Directory

Meleia Whitaker Simon-Reynolds
  • Title
    • PhD Candidate
    • Director of the Watsonville is in the Heart Digital Archive
  • Division Humanities Division
  • Department
    • History Department
    • History of Art/Visual Culture
  • Email
  • Office Location
    • Remote work location, N/A
  • Mail Stop History Department

Research Interests

  • Transpacific Filipino migration and labor
  • Snapshots of everyday life and self-representations
  • Photograph albums, orality, and materiality
  • Public history and community-centered archiving

Biography, Education and Training

Education

M.A. History, University of California, Santa Cruz 

B.A., History summa cum laude, University of California, Irvine

Current Public History Projects

Watsonville is in the Heart: A Community Archive and Research-Initiative

  • Director of digital archiving and educational programs, January 2020- present

Okinawa Memories Initiative 

  • Exhibits and Curriculum Development lead, January 2018- present

Honors, Awards and Grants

  • President's Dissertation Year Fellowship. 2024-2025
  • Center for Archival Research and Training Fellowship, 2023-2024
  • UCSC History Department Summer Dissertation Grant, 2023                                        
  • UCSC History Department Summer Dissertation Fellowship, 2022
  • The Humanities Institute Summer Dissertation Fellowship, 2022
  • The Humanities Insititute Public Fellowship 2021-2022
  • Social Science Research Council's Dissertation Proposal Development Program (SSRC-DPD) 2020
  • The Humanities Institute Summer Research Fellowship 2020
  • CITL Graduate Pedagogy Fellowship 2020 
  • National Humanities Center GSSR Fellow 2020 
  • Regent's Fellowship 2018-2019

Selected Publications

  • Ayson Plank, Christina, Meleia Simon-Reynolds, Olivia Sawi, Dr. Kathleen Cruz Gutierrez, and Dr. Steve McKay, “Building A Community Archive: Preserving and Uplifting Stories of Filipino Labor and Migration,” FANHS Journal 11, (2023): 161-170.
  • Ayson Plank, Christina and Meleia Simon-Reynolds, "Watsonville is in the Heart: Documenting Histories of Transpacific Filipinx Migration in the Pajaro Valley," Pacific Arts Journal 22, no. 1 (2022): 250-261. 

Selected Presentations

  • “Connecting Humanities Undergraduates with Community Projects and Future Careers,” National Humanities Conference, November 11, 2022.
  • “Watsonville is in the Heart: Reflections on Community-engaged Oral History, Archiving, and Exhibition Curation,” All-In Conference, October 27, 2022.
  • “Navigating Silences and Things Left Unsaid: Watsonville is in the Heart, a Community Oral History Case Study” Oral History Association Annual Conference, October 22, 2022.
  • “Building A Community Archive: Preserving and Uplifting Stories of Filipino Labor and Migration,” Filipino American National Historical Society Conference, August 13, 2022.
  • “Impassioned Online Teaching: Empathy, Embodiment, and Radical Pedagogy,” The Humanities Institute PhD+ Series, November 3, 2020.
  • “Transpacific Images: Photographic Representations of Filipinx Migrants in California and Hawai‘i,” UCSC Graduate Research Symposium, April 20, 2021.

Selected Exhibitions

Teaching Interests

  • Asian American history
  • History of photography
  • US Empire in the Pacific
  • Public History 

Instructor of Record Experience

  • UC Santa Cruz, History 106B: Asian and Asian American History, 1941- present
  • San Jose State University, AAS1: Introduction to Asian American Studies

UCSC Teaching Assistant Experience 

  • History 80X: World War II Memories in the U.S. and Japan 
  • History 10A: US History to 1877
  • History 10B: US History 1877-1977
  • History 80Y: Grassroots Movements and Social Change
  • History 13: Introduction to American Religious Culture 
  • History 59: History of the English Language 
  • History 81: Science in the Colonial World
  • History 143B: History of the Philippines