Faculty
Director
Carolyn Chen, Associate Professor of Sociology, (Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley, 2001) is the author of the book, Getting Saved in America, which compares Taiwanese immigrants who have converted to evangelical Protestantism, those who have converted to active membership in a Buddhist temple, and those who do not seek any active religious affiliation. Extensive ethnographic fieldwork in the evangelical and Buddhist congregations and in work and family settings, along with formal interviews, enables her to analyze how religions provide the institutional and symbolic resources for the constructions of new selves and new communities for immigrants in the U.S.
Email: cechen@northwestern.edu
Core Faculty
Jinah Kim (Ph.D., University of California, San Diego, 2006) currently studies the differential racialization of Latino immigrants, Asian immigrants, and African Americans through the analysis of multiculturalism, neoliberal discourse, and "romantic" representations of the Asia-Pacific. She is also conducting research for her other project, which looks at the relationship between the Mexican Bracero Project and the Internment of Japanese Americans during WWII. Through the study of Asian/American representations her work attempts to make visible the ways in which Asia, Latin America, and the United States are interconnected in the 20th and 21st centuries. She is teaching courses about Asian American literature and film, Los Angeles, and cultures of globalization.
Email: jinah-kim@northwestern.edu
Phuong Nguyen is our current Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, having recently received his Ph.D. from the Department of American Studies & Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. His dissertation,THE PEOPLE OF THE FALL: REFUGEE NATIONALISM IN LITTLE SAIGON, 1975-2005, argues that Vietnamese Americans may have entered the United States as refugees in the legal sense but they also learned to become refugees in the cultural sense. As recipients of American charity (as well as American racism) their political identity has historically favored outpourings of eternal gratitude towards the nation credited with rescuing them from a life without freedom. Their identity, and that of many other refugees in America, challenges the traditional models of racial formation and consciousness applied to Asian Americans of immigrant descent. Besides Refugee Studies and Ethnic Studies, Dr. Nguyen enjoys discussing political economy (economic philosophy), popular culture, and community formation.
Email: p-nguyen@northwestern.edu
Shalini Shankar is an Associate Professor in Anthropology. As a sociocultural and linguistic anthropologist her central concerns include race and ethnicity, class, globalization and diaspora, Asian American youth culture, multiculturalism and multilingualism, consumption, and media. Shankar’s new book, entitled Desi Land: Teen Culture, Class, and Success in Silicon Valley (Duke U Press, Fall 2008) focuses on Desi (South Asian American) youth in socieconomically and racially diverse high schools and analyzes how their everyday cultural and linguistic practices intersect with their immigration history and class status to position them in school, as well as impact their educational and career paths. Her publications and presentations focus on how Asian American youth mediate racial hierarchies, create identities through material culture, media, and language use, and strive to find a place for themselves in competitive urban and suburban regions.
Email: sshankar@northwestern.edu
Nitasha Tamar Sharma, Assistant Professor of African American Studies and Asian American Studies (PhD, University of California, Santa Barbara, 2004).
Dr. Sharma's academic activities are based on an interdisciplinary, comparative, and ethnographic approach to the study of difference, inequality, and racism. The central goal of her teaching, research, and writing is to develop models for multiracial alliance building by zeroing in on cultural phenomena that unearth and challenge the factors that structure contentious race relations. Her book, Hip Hop Desis: South Asian Americans, Blackness, and a Global Race Consciousness (Duke 2010), analyzes why second generation members of an upwardly mobile and middle-class immigrant group identify with Blacks—a group that has been constructed as “disadvantaged.” She reveals how South Asian Americans, or desis, develop new anti-racist models of immigrant identity that challenge the narrow identity politics of ethnicity. The racial consciousness expressed by these hip hop artists as “people of color” facilitates the development of multiracial coalitions that cross boundaries while explicitly acknowledging “difference.” Currently, Dr. Sharma is collecting ethnographic data for her second project, Hapas and Douglas: Asian/Black Multiraciality in Hawai‘i and Trinidad. This transoceanic analysis of multiracial Black Asians and Black Pacific Islanders details how mixed race people negotiate, express, and repress race as they identify across constructed racial categories. It illustrates the heterogeneity of African and Asian diasporas by locating Asians in the Caribbean and Blacks in the Pacific. This work speaks to debates in Mixed Race Studies, Comparative Race Studies, and Diaspora Studies. Ultimately, her research examines overlapping Asian/Black diasporas and in the process develops new ways of conceptualizing race—and forging models of anti-racism—that is global in scope. Dr. Sharma teaches courses on the Racial and Gender Politics of Hip Hop, Asian/Black Relations in the U.S., Asian Americans of Mixed Racial Descent, and Race, Crime, and Punishment: The Border, Prisons, and Post-9/11 Detentions.
Professor Nitasha Sharma receiving the 2009 Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences "The Award For Distinguished Teaching". In the photo (left-right) Dr. Darlene Clark Hine, Chair of African American Studies, Dr. Ji-Yeon Yuh, Director of Asian American Studies, Dr. Nitasha Sharma, Dr. Sarah Mangelsdorf, Dean of Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences.
Email: n-sharma@northwestern.edu
Ji-Yeon Yuh, Associate Professor of History and Director, Asian American Studies Program (Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania, 1999) specializes in Asian American history and Asian diasporas. She is the author of Beyond the Shadow of Camptown: Korean Military Brides in America (New York University Press, 2002). A history of Korean women who immigrated to the United States as the wives of U.S. soldiers, this work examines the dynamics of race, culture, gender and nationalism from the perspective of Korean military brides. With a fellowship from the Social Science Research Council, she recently spent a year in China and Japan researching ethnic Korean communities for a comparative study of the Korean diaspora in China, Japan and the United States. This study examines policies toward minority ethnic groups and their impact on the development of community and identity, as well as the ways in which experiences of Koreans in the diaspora are connected and divided by the history of the Korean peninsula in the twentieth century. As such, the study examines issues of imperialism, gender, history and memory, race and racialization, and the uses and misuses of ideology. She has also done research on refugees from North Korea, on socialist Koreans in China and Japan in the immediate post-WWII period, and on the Korean reunification movement in the United States. She is a co-founder of the Alliance of Scholars Concerned about Korea (www.asck.org), an organization devoted to educating policy makers and the public, and serves as their Media Liaison and National Spokesperson.
Email: j-yuh@northwestern.edu
Affiliates of Asian American Studies
Joshua Takano Chambers-Letson
Ivy Wilson
