people
Principal Investigators
Kandice Chuh (CUNY Graduate Center) is a professor of English, American Studies, and Critical Social Psychology at the CUNY Graduate Center. She researches and teaches in such areas as aesthetics, race, queer of color critique, and Asian American and Asian diasporic studies. Chuh’s publications include the monographs Imagine Otherwise: on Asian Americanist Critique (2003) and The Difference Aesthetics Makes: on the humanities ‘after Man’ (2019). President of the American Studies Association from 2017-18, she has participated in governance of other associations including the Association for Asian American Studies and the Modern Language Association. She served as executive officer (chair) of the PhD Program in English from 2019-2022, and is a member of the steering committee of the newly established PhD Program in Black, Race, and Ethnic Studies. Chuh is currently completing The Disinterested Teacher, a collection of essays on teaching and academic practice, and Studying Asia, a book-length study of contemporary Asian racialization.
Thuy Linh Tu (NYU) is a professor in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at NYU. Among other works, she is the author of The Beautiful Generation: Asian Americans and the Cultural Economy of Fashion (Duke University Press, 2011), winner of the Cultural Studies Book Prize from the Association for Asian American Studies. Her most recent book, Experiments in Skin: Race and Beauty in the Shadows of Vietnam (Duke University Press, 2021), won the RR Hawkins prize from the Association of American Publishers. She currently serves as associate director of NYU’s Prison Education Program, through which she has been engaged in a multi-year collaborative research project on debt and incarceration.
Dissertation Fellows
Karen Hui is a PhD candidate in cultural anthropology at the Graduate Center. Her research examines the politics and ethics of middle-class child-rearing in contemporary Shenzhen, China (where she was raised), and its relationship to national imaginaries of the future. She has taught courses on cultural anthropology at Baruch College.
Elliott Jun is a PhD candidate in the English department at the CUNY Graduate Center. He earned an M.A in Gender Studies at Queen’s University and his B.A in English and Gender Studies at the University of Toronto. His yet to be named or completed dissertation works through tracing the contradictory constructions and productions of “Asia” in the early modern and how they are co-constitutive in the production of modernity, humanism, empire, and racial capitalism even as they shift the temporalities and geographies boundaries of what constitutes these processes.
Cristine Sabrina Khan is a Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology at CUNY Graduate Center. Her dissertation research examines how racialized colonial legacies and relations with Black and Asian communities in the diaspora impact second-generation Indo-Caribbean identity movements in New York and Toronto. She is interested in how racialization processes and hierarchies of race shape immigrant identities and experiences. Her research also unpacks how virtual spaces through social media facilitate transnational conversations about racialized identities for the second generation. Her research has been funded by the Russell Sage Foundation and the Social Science Research Council.
Cristine’s academic work is embedded in her personal biography growing up in Queens, New York and her work with multiple community organizations centered on Indo-Caribbean communities in South Richmond Hill, Queens. Her most recent publication in the Journal of Ethnic and Racial Studies examines intergenerational differences in anti-Black ideologies within the Indo-Caribbean community in New York City. She argues that global anti-Black framings stemming from the colonial period in the Caribbean coupled with anti-Black racism in the US work together to impact how Indo-Caribbeans construct ideas of Blackness. She has also published with Social Identities where she argues that community organizations are pivotal in constructing ethno-racial identities for the second generation. Prior to this research, Cristine published within the field of critical linguistic studies, underscoring how structures of racism and gender discrimination impact English language teaching.
Postdoctoral Fellow
Takuya Maeda is a Sawyer Mellon postdoctoral fellow in Transpacific Thought and the Problem of Asia. He is a historian of the transpacific entanglements of infrastructure, settler colonialism, and global capitalism in postwar Japan and the United States. His current project, “Settler Technocracy: Artificial Islands and the Infrastructures of Settler Colonialism in the Postwar Transpacific,” examines two powerful symbols of the rebirth of the Japanese and Hawaiian archipelagos through postwar science and technology: the artificial islands of Port Island in Kobe and Sand Island in Honolulu. By reading across archives, disciplinary traditions, and geographic expertise, the project explores how transpacific settler environmentalism enabled the expansion of postwar global capitalism. He was a recipient of the Japan Foundation Doctoral Fellowship (2021-2022) and spent his fellowship year at the University of Tokyo. He will receive his PhD in History from Brown University in 2024.
Steering Committee
Denise Cruz (Professor, English, Columbia University). Professor Cruz (she/hers) writes and teaches about gender and sexuality in national and transnational cultures. She uses spatial and geographic frameworks (from the transpacific, to the regional, to the Global South) to examine previously unstudied archives (from the first works of English literature by Filipina and Filipino authors, to private papers that document connections between the Midwest and U. S. empire, to fashion shows in Manila). She contends that this combined analytical and archival approach extends our understanding of the importance of national, regional, transnational, and global dynamics in North America, the Philippines, and Asia. As a feminist scholar, she is especially interested in examining how these interactions have historically impacted and continue to influence constructions of gender and sexuality. Her first book, Transpacific Feminnities: The Making of the Modern Filipina analyzed connections between the rise of Philippine print culture in English and the emergence of new classes of transpacific women from the early to the mid- twentieth century. She is currently working on two book projects: a history and study of the development of high fashion in Manila from the 1940s to the present (funded by a multi-year Insight Grant from Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council), and an analysis of the importance of regions and regionalism to Asian America. Cruz previously taught in the departments of English at the University of Toronto and English and American Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington.
Allan Isaac (Professor, American Studies and English, Rutgers University). Professor Isaac specializes in Asian American, comparative ethnic and postcolonial aspects of contemporary American literary and cultural studies. His first book American Tropics: Articulating Filipino America (University of Minnesota Press, 2006) is the recipient of the Association for Asian American Studies Cultural Studies Book Award. In 2003-2004, he was a Senior Fulbright Scholar at DeLaSalle University-Taft in Manila, Philippines. He received his BA from Williams College and his PhD in Comparative Literature from NYU. He teaches a broad range of courses in theory and literature, Asian American Studies, critical race theory, law and literature, and comparative race studies. His most recent book is Filipino Time: Affective Worlds and Contracted Labor (Fordham UP, 2022).
Martin Manalansan IV (Professor, Women and Gender Studies, Rutgers University). Martin F. Manalansan IV is a Professor of Women and Gender Studies at Rutgers University. He has taught at University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, University of the Philippines, New York University, New School University, Wesleyan University, and the City University of New York. As a cultural anthropologist, he is interested in the ethnographic study of the small, the fleeting, the contingent, and the “infra-ordinary.” He conducts interdisciplinary research on queer theory, sexuality and gender, Asian Americans, Filipino global diaspora, affect and embodiment, food and culture, decolonial politics of social science theory, popular culture, urban modernity, and vernacular globalization. His work focuses on marginalized lives mired not only in the necropolitical but are simultaneously animated by the messy energies of desire and pleasure.
Before going back to academia, Manalansan worked for 10 years in AIDS/HIV research, program evaluation and prevention education at the Gay Men’s Health Crisis and the Asian Pacific Islander Coalition on HIV/AIDS both in New York City. This experience has shaped his goal in combining academic pursuits with social justice activism.
Paul Nadal (Assistant Professor, English and American Studies, Princeton University). Paul Nadal is an Assistant Professor of English and American Studies, and an associate faculty member of the Program in Media and Modernity at Princeton University. Recently named Laurance S. Rockefeller University Preceptor for the Center for Human Values at Princeton University, his courses include “Asian American Literature,” “Global Novel,” “Model Minority Fictions,” and “World Scale.” I also teach graduate seminars on racial capitalism and Marxist aesthetic theory. His article, “Cold War Remittance Economy,” American Quarterly 73.3 (2021), received the 1921 Best Essay Prize, which is annually awarded by the American Literature Society for “the best article in any field of American literature.”
Juliana Hu Pegues (Associate Professor, English, Cornell). Juliana Hu Pegues is associate professor in the Department of Literatures in English at Cornell University, where she specializes in Asian American studies, Native and Indigenous studies, women of color feminism, and queer of color critique. She is author of Space-Time Colonialism: Alaska’s Indigenous and Asian Entanglements (2021), which won the American Studies Association’s Lora Romero First Book Prize. She previously taught at the University of Minnesota and Smith College.
Karen Shimakawa (Associate Professor, Performance Studies, NYU). Karen Shimakawa is associate professor of Performance Studies and an Associate Dean of the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU. She is the author of National Abjection: The Asian American Body Onstage (2003) and co-editor of Orientations: Mapping Studies in the AsianDiaspora (2001) with Kandice Chuh. Her research and teaching focus on critical race theory, law and performance, and Asian American performance. She is currently researching a project on the political and ethical performativity of discomfort. Shimakawa has held a Fulbright lectureship in Japan, and has held fellowships at the University of California Humanities Research Institute and the UC Davis Humanities Institute. She was also a participant in the Rockefeller/Ford Asian Pacific Performance Exchange.
Van C. Tran (Sociology and International Migration Studies, CUNY Graduate Center). Professor Tran is an immigration scholar and urban sociologist who studies the integration of immigrants and their children, ethnic and racial categories, diversity and intergroup relations, neighborhood gentrification, and urban poverty and social inequality. His research employs a multidisciplinary, multimethod approach to the dual study of immigrant and urban life, with a focus on how immigration has transformed local communities across the country.
Tran’s research and teaching are deeply connected to the diversity, history, and vibrancy of New York City. After spending his early years in refugee detention camps in Northern Thailand, Tran — a native of Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam — moved to the Bronx as a teenager when his family was resettled by the International Rescue Committee in 1998. As an undergraduate at Hostos Community College and Hunter College, Tran developed an interest in immigration and urban inequality while observing New York City’s eclectic neighborhoods and ethnic communities. As a social scientist, he views the city as a social laboratory for original research and innovative teaching, both of which hold the potential to substantively inform urban social policy. Since 2019, Tran has helped mobilize research on critical issues facing New York City as the deputy director for The Graduate Center’s Center for Urban Research.
The author or co-author of 30 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters, Tran has carved out several unique pathways in his research trajectory. The Social Life of Amsterdam Avenue, an in-progress book manuscript, examines the consequences of gentrification for neighborhood residents and businesses in Manhattan’s West Side. A separate project on the Asian American experience is yielding crucial insight into Asian Americans’ views on affirmative action, attitudes toward immigration policy, patterns of socioeconomic attainment, and the transition from higher education into the workplace. A third project draws on an experimental study on the nature and sources of anti-immigrant attitudes in the United States. Finally, Tran’s research continues to focus on the linguistic, socioeconomic, civic, and political integration of second-generation Latinos.
Tran began his academic career as a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health & Society postdoctoral scholar at the University of Pennsylvania. He later joined Columbia University as a sociology professor and co-founded the university’s Race, Ethnicity, and Migration Workshop.
