Home
> About Us
> Faculty
 |
 |
|
||||
|
Program Faculty: Carolyn
Chen | Jinah
Kim | Phuong Nguyen Graduate Instructors: Heidi Kim | Stephen Mak | Shuji Otsuka
Program Faculty: Carolyn Chen, Assistant 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. She can be reached at cechen@northwestern.edu.
Jinah Kim (Ph.D., University of California, San Diego, 2006) currrently 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 and can be reached at <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,
Shalini Shankar is a sociocultural and linguistic anthropologist whose 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. She can be reached at <sshankar@northwestern.edu>
Nitasha Tamar Sharma, Assistant Professor of African American
Studies and Asian American Studies (Ph.D., University of California, Santa
Barbara, 2004) is trained formally as an anthropologist, but does interdisciplinary
work centering on the experiences of second
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. 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. She can be reached at j-yuh@northwestern.edu.
Graduate Instructors: Heidi Kim, Graduate Instructor (Ph.D. candidate, Northwestern University) teaches Asian American Literature. She can be reached at <heidikim@northwestern.edu>.
Stephen Mak is a PhD Candidate in the History Department and an Instructor for the Asian American Studies Program. He researches and teaches social and political history, especially the intersection of foreign relations and immigration policy. His dissertation, "Enemy Aliens in a World at War: America's Other Internment during World War II," examines questions of race, citizenship, and international human rights. In the Fall Quarter, he offers the course "The Politics of Race and Immigration." In the Winter, he will offer a new course about human rights from the Japanese American Internment to Guantanamo. Stephen earned his bachelor's degree at Cornell University, where he was a Dean's Scholar and majored in Industrial and Labor Relations. His senior honors thesis won the Joel Seidman Prize. He decided to attend graduate school to continue reading, writing, and thinking about the world around him. Before coming to Northwestern, he worked at the labor policy office of Senator Edward M. Kennedy and taught social studies in New York's Chinatown, two experiences that revealed the challenges of policy-making and the rewards of teaching. He can be reached at <s-mak@northwestern.edu>
Shuji Otsuka, Graduate Instructor (Ph.D. candidate, Northwestern University) teaches a variety of courses that compare the historical experience of Asian Americans with other minority groups in the United States and that place Asian Americans in international contexts. He has offered seminars on the "East Asian Diaspora," "Japanese Americans and the Pacific Wars," "Asian Immigration to the United States," and "Asian Americans, Mexican Americans, and African Americans: Comparative Racial Formations in U.S. History." His dissertation is on Japanese who became students in American universities after World War II. In his spare time, he trains for the GSA 5K and is a longtime fan of the Chicago Fire. He can be reached at s-otsuka@kellogg.northwestern.edu |
|||||
 |
||||||
|
|
|||||
