Staff
Director
Carolyn Chen, is the new director of the Asian American Studies Program at Northwestern. She is an Associate Professor of Sociology, (Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley, 2001). She 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
Assistant Director
Jinah Kim (Ph.D., University of California, San Diego, 2006) Jinah Kim is Assistant Director and lecturer in the Asian American Studies Program at Northwestern University. Her current project studies how Asian American literature functions as part of a larger cross-cultural exchange that recovers, documents, and re-imagines the immigrant Pacific for the 21st century. She is also conducting research for her second project which looks at the relationship between the Mexican Bracero project and the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII through the lens of the “third border’ or the policing of citizenship within national boundaries. She was born in Seoul, South Korea and moved to the U.S. when she was eight. After graduating with a BA in English from Columbia University, she worked as a union organizer for Local 2110, UAW-Clerical workers. She received her Ph.D. in Cultural Studies from UC San Diego in 2006. Her areas of specialization include Asian American Literature, American wars in Asia, Comparative Asian American and Latina/o Cultural Studies, Film, Visual Culture, Print and Multi-Media Studies, Globalization and Gender and Sexuality studies.
Email: jinah-kim@northwestern.edu
