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Program Faculty: Ji-Yeon Yuh | Carolyn Chen | Nitasha Sharma | Shalini Shankar | Jinah Kim | Shanshan Lan | John Cheng Graduate Instructors: Heidi Kim | Stephen Mak | Shuji Otsuka | David Tully 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. Carolyn Chen, Assistant Professor of Sociology, (Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley, 2001) is currently working on the project, "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.
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
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 forthcoming monograph, 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>
Jinah Kim, Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow (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>.
Shanshan Lan, Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow (Ph.D. in Anthropology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2007) has major research interests in race and ethnicity, with a special focus on post-1965 Asian immigrants’ experience of racialization in the United States; interethnic relations among minority groups in multiracial urban U.S. communities, especially among Asian Americans, African Americans and Latinos; globalization and the Asian diaspora in North America. Her dissertation, “Learning Race and Class: Chinese Americans in Multiracial Bridgeport,” explores how class positions mediate Chinese Americans’ perceptions of and reactions towards racial difference in Bridgeport, a multiracial working-class immigrant community adjacent to Chicago’s Chinatown. Dr. Lan’s publications include, “Chinese Americans in Multiracial Chicago: A Story of Overlapping Racializations” (Asian American Law Journal, 13, 2006), and “Race, Class and the Politics of Multicultural Learning: Chinese Immigrant Workers and the Brokered American Dream in Chicago” (City and Society, 19, 2007). She is now in the process of preparing her dissertation into a book manuscript for publication. Dr. Lan has taught classes on ethnographies of Chinese Americans and in winter 2008 she will be teaching “Imagining Chinatown: Race, Community Building and the Construction of Differences.” She can be reached at <s-lan@northwestern.edu>. John Cheng, Lecturer and Acting Director, Asian American Studies Program (Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley, 1997) has broad research interests including: popular culture, race and ethnic studies including Asian American Studies, cultural studies and critical theory, and the history of science. His book, Imagining Science: Science Fiction and the Culture of Popular Science, is forthcoming from the University of Pennsylvania Press. He is working on a new project on Asian American cultural studies, law, and geography and writing pieces on Taiwanese American identity and politics. He can be reached at <jcheng@northwestern.edu>. 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 David Tully, Graduate Instructor (Ph.D. candidate, Northwestern University) teaches Asian American Politics. He can be reached at <d-tully@northwestern.edu>. |
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