Erin E. Collins (Dartmouth College) is an Assistant Professor of Geography at Dartmouth College. She is a feminist, urban geographer who studies the political economy and cultural politics of urban transformation with particular interest in the politics of displacement (both historic and contemporary) in Southeast Asian cities. Her current research is based in Phnom Penh, Cambodia and examines claims to space and power between 1979- 2017. Her scholarship and teaching are influenced by transnational feminist, post-colonial, and global urban studies.
Charles L. Davis II (University of Texas at Austin) is an associate professor of architectural history and criticism at UT Austin’s School of Architecture. His academic research excavates the role of racial identity and race thinking in architectural history and contemporary design culture. Dr. Davis is currently working on two book projects. The first is a sole-authored monograph tentatively entitled “Putting Black in Place: A Spatial History of Black Architectural Modernity," which recovers the overlooked contributions of black artists and architects in shaping the built environment from the Harlem Renaissance to Black Lives Matter. A second book project is a co-edited volume that examines the racial underpinnings of the historiography of nineteenth-century American Architecture.
Sujin Eom is an Assistant Professor of Asian Studies in the Department of Asian Societies, Cultures, and Languages at Dartmouth College. A scholar of architecture and urbanism whose research is anchored in a historical inquiry into race, migration, and the built environment, Eom is currently completing her first book manuscript that situates “Chinatown” as an imaginative and material space within the global history of empire, labor migration, and violence. Eom’s research interests lie in colonial architecture and urbanism, migration and diaspora, race and racism, Asian/American art and architecture, and postcolonial studies. Her writings have been published in Modern Asian Studies, Planning Perspectives, and positions as well as in edited volumes such as On the Margins of Urban South Korea (2019), Imaginaries of Connectivity and Creation of Novel Spaces of Governance (2019), and The Palgrave Handbook of Bottom-Up Urbanism (2018).
Lynne Horiuchi is an independent scholar who received her Ph.D. in 2005 from the University of California at Santa Barbara. She has published numerous articles on the built environments of Japanese American incarceration. Race, space, architecture and ethics are her theoretical interests crossing over into Asian American studies, art history, vernacular architecture, urban planning, and critical race studies. She has co-written with Anoma Pieris a volume on imprisonment during World War II from Singapore to North America, The Architecture of Confinement: Incarceration Camps of the Pacific War (University of Cambridge Press, 2002). She has co-edited a volume with Tanu Sankalia Urban Reinventions: San Francisco’s Treasure Island (University of Hawaii Press, 2017) that examines the complete transformations of a man-made island for the Golden Gate International Exposition, a military base and a new neighborhood in San Francisco. She is completing a volume, Dislocations and Relocations: The Planning, Design, and Construction of Prison Cities for Japanese and Japanese Americans, that interrogates the relationships between architecture, vernacular building, military design and the construction of prison cities. She has taught at the University of North Carolina in the Department or Architecture and recently for the Future Histories Lab at the University of California at Berkeley drawing from her decades of community activism in West Oakland. She has served on the Board of the Rosie of the Riveter Trust and numerous other community organizations and committees. She is Secretary and a Board Member of the Society of Architectural History (SAH) and has served as the Co-Chair of the SAH Minority Scholars Affiliate, initiating affiliate groups with other scholars of color to diversify SAH. She is also a Research Affiliate at the Asian American Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley, working on interdisciplinary approaches to the study of architecture and Asian Americans.
Hosu Kim is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Anthropology, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the College of Staten Island and a doctoral faculty of Critical Social Psychology program at the Graduate Center, the City University of New York. Her current project, From the Ground of Missing: Ethics and Politics of Repair and State Violence in Korea examines multiple sites of the disappearance at the sites of the state and imperial violence in South Korea. By employing “missing” as a method, she interrogates epistemological limit of major truth-seeking efforts and explores alternative ethics and politics of repair. She is also an author of Birth Mothers and Transnational Adoption Practice in South Korea: Virtual Mothering, published by Palgrave-Macmillan in 2016.
Jinah Kim (California State University, Northridge) received her Ph.D. in Cultural Studies from the Department of Literature at the University of California, San Diego. Her teaching and research focus on the histories and cultures of migration and contact between Asia and the Americas that are the legacies of modernity and war, and the migration of bodies, capital, representations and culture. Jinah’s courses seek to build student knowledge and facility with Cultural Studies, Global Asia Studies, Gender and Women’s Studies, and Ethnic Studies. In her classes, students explore the narrative and visual media archive of the 20th and 21st centuries as a laboratory and field of investigation for modern identities, representations, theory and meaning.
Jodi Kim is Professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College. Her research traverses the interdisciplinary humanities and is broadly concerned with the intersections of colonial and imperial formations, militarism, capitalism, and gendered racial violence. She is the author of Settler Garrison: Debt Imperialism, Militarism, and Transpacific Imaginaries (Duke University Press, 2022), Ends of Empire: Asian American Critique and the Cold War (University of Minnesota Press, 2010), and Co-Editor of Critical Ethnic Studies: A Reader (Duke University Press, 2016).
Sunmin Kim is primarily interested in bringing insights from sociology of culture and knowledge into the studies of race and immigration in the United States. Kim is currently working on a book manuscript that looks at how American social scientists and federal bureaucrats attempted to study immigrants in the early twentieth century, and how such attempts led to the re-invention of the principles of boundary-making around the American nation. To answer these questions, Kim is analyzing archival materials related to the Dillingham Commission Report (1911) – the most comprehensive study of immigrants ever undertaken by the federal government. In his other projects, Kim works on political incorporation of immigrants and their children in New York City; varying cultural criteria of defining "foreigners" in developed countries; political participation of minorities; policy preferences of Asian Americans; guidelines for gathering and analyzing archival data; the National Archive files of early 20th century Korean immigrants; and the relationship between democracy and public opinion polling in East Asia. In addition to his Ph.D. in sociology from University of California, Berkeley, Kim received B.A. and M.A. in sociology from Seoul National University.
Yeong Ran Kim is a Mellon Digital Media Fellow at Sarah Lawrence College, who sees aesthetic practices as central means to build social movements that create unique moments of coming together. Kim’s interdisciplinary projects draw together their research in contemporary queer culture with performance theory, Asian/American studies, gender and sexuality studies, and film and new media studies. Kim’s publications include journal articles such as “Queer Archives, Performance, and Historiography in South Korea: siren eun young jung’s Yeosung Gukgeuk Project” (TDR: The Drama Review, 2023) and “Queer Protest! Solidarity and the Formation of Minority Politics in South Korea” (Korea Journal, 2021). Kim is a visual/sonic media composer and a member of “The Urban Mythfits,” a performance-artists collective based in New York City. Their work has been showcased at Re/Mixed Media Festival, Queens Museum, and the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center at CUNY Graduate Center. They hold a PhD in Theatre Arts and Performance Studies from Brown University.
Yoonkyung Lee is a professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Toronto and serves as the director of the Centre for the Study of Korea in the same school (2019-2022 and 2023-2024). She is a political sociologist specializing in labor politics, social movements, democracy, and the political economy of neoliberalism with a regional focus on East Asia. She is the author of two books, Militants or Partisans: Labor Unions and Democratic Politics in Korea and Taiwan (Stanford University Press 2011) and Between the Streets and the Assembly: Social Movements, Political Parties, and Democracy in Korea (University of Hawaii Press 2022), in addition to a number of journal articles and book chapters on labor movements and democratic politics. Her recent publication includes “Cold War Undercurrents: The Extreme Right Variants in East Asian Democracies,” (Politics and Society, 2021), “Right-Wing Activism in Asia: Cold War Legacies, Geopolitics, and Democratic Erosion,” (Politics and Society, 2021), and “Neoliberal Methods of Labor Repression: Privatized Violence and Dispossessive Litigation in Korea” (Journal of Contemporary Asia, 2021: Journal of Contemporary Asia’s Best Article Prize in 2021).
Sean McPherson is Associate Professor of Art History in the Department of Art & Art History and Coordinator of the interdisciplinary Asian Studies program at Bridgewater State University in Bridgewater, Massachusetts, where he teaches classes on the art and architecture of Asia and the Asian diaspora. McPherson is the founding Co-Chair of the SAH Asian American & Diasporic Architectural History Affiliate Group, and Co-Director of the collaboration between this SAH collective and the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum “In Search of AAPI Architects and Designers,” a study of significant work in the US by architects and designers of Asian descent. McPherson is the co-editor of the forthcoming SAH roundtable, “Asian American and Pacific Islander Architectural Histories: Mapping the Field and Its Futures,” in the March 2024 issue of the Journal of Architectural Historians. His current book project is a transnational history of spaces for Buddhist worship constructed by Japanese immigrant communities in the United States. A former architect and carpenter trained in Japanese timber-frame construction, McPherson holds an M.Arch and Ph.D. in Architectural History from UC Berkeley. His research interests include the art and architecture of Japanese Shintō shrine festivals, the architecture of Japanese American Buddhism, Asian American cultural landscapes, and issues of equity and accessibility in higher education.
Ed Miller is an Associate Professor of History and Asian Studies at Dartmouth College. He is a historian, teacher, and digital humanist. Dr. Miller's research and teaching focus on Modern Vietnam, the Vietnam War, and oral history. His scholarship explores the international and transnational dimensions of the Vietnam War and is based on research in archives in Vietnam, Europe, and the United States. His publications include Misalliance: Ngo Dinh Diem, the United States, and the Fate of South Vietnam (Harvard, 2013) and The Vietnam War: A Documentary Reader (Wiley, 2016).
Youjeong Oh is Associate Professor in the Department of Asian Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Her book, Pop City: Korean Popular Culture and the Selling of Place (Cornell, 2018), explores how Korean municipalities have used Korean TV dramas and K-pop music in their place and tourism promotion. Her current research is about (over)development, dispossession, and desires in Jeju. Her other research interests include urban social movements, colonization through development, decolonization, indigenous resurgence, and media, tourism, and place in East Asia. Her work has been published in the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Tourism Geographies, Media, Culture & Society, and the Journal of Korean Studies. Dr. Oh is a member of the Northeast Asia Council of the Association for Asian Studies (NEAC) Distinguished Speakers Bureau. She received a Ph.D. in Geography from UC Berkeley.
Josephine Faith Ong (she/her/hers) is a Ph.D. candidate in Gender Studies at UCLA and a Predoctoral to Postdoctoral Fellow in Asian American Studies at Dartmouth College. Motivated by her experiences living and organizing under U.S. military occupation of Guåhan, her research focuses on Filipino American studies, Chamorro studies, Indigenous feminist cartographies, queer studies, and feminist archival Studies. Building upon these interests, Josephine’s dissertation investigates the Spanish and U.S. empire’s turn-of-the twentieth century colonial mappings of peoples and places in Guåhan. Specifically, she traces how colonial archival production constructs Chamorro-Filipino deviance and how it may fail through their alternative modes of being and solidarity. Josephine’s work has been published in journals such as the Journal of the Critical Ethnic Studies Association, Cultural Studies, and the Journal of the Association of Asian American Studies. She has previously received the UCLA Institute of American Cultures Research Grant, UCLA Graduate Research Mentorship, Stanley Kwok Lau and Dora Wong Lau Memorial Internship, Don T. Nakanishi Award for Outstanding Engaged Scholarship, and honorable mention for the Ford Predoctoral Fellowship to support this work.
Jesook Song is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto in Canada. She is a socio-cultural anthropologist with interests in (non)sovereignty, dwelling, debt and finance, labor and education, gender and sexuality, redress and post-revolution, and transnational Korean studies. Her first book, South Koreans in the Debt Crisis (Duke University Press, 2009) deals with homelessness and youth unemployment during the Asian financial crisis in the late 1990s to early millennium. Her second book Living on Their Own (SUNY Press, 2014) is about single household and informal financial markets through single women’s struggle in South Korea. She has also published an edited volume, New Millennium South Korea (Routledge, 2011), and two co-edited volumes On the Margins of Urban South Korea (University of Toronto, 2019) and Mediating Gender (University of Michigan Press, 2024). She has also published numerous book chapters and articles in journals, including positions, Journal of Asian Studies, Journal of Korean Studies, Feminist Review, Gender Place and Culture, Urban Geography, Antipode, Anthropology Quarterly, Critique of Anthropology.
Preeti Singh (she/her) is a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Asian Societies, Cultures, and Languages program at Dartmouth College. Her research centers on literary expressions of political and social crises at the intersections of decolonization and the global cold war, discourses of human rights, and the rhetoric and theories of populism. Her book project, Postcolonial Exceptions: Cultural Lives of the Indian National Emergency (1975-1977) examines literary and cinematic representations of the national emergency declared by Indian prime-minister Indira Gandhi on June 25, 1975. Preeti’s writing has appeared in South Asian Review, The International Journal of Comic Art, the Journal of Drama Studies, Strange Horizons, and Raiot Magazine.
Ma Vang is an Associate Professor of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Merced. Her book, History on the Run: Secrecy, Fugitivity, and Hmong Refugee Epistemologies (Duke University Press, 2021), examines how secrecy structures both official knowledge and refugee epistemologies about militarism and forced migration. She is co-author of Departures: An Introduction to Critical Refugee Studies (UC Press, 2022) and co-editor of Claiming Place: On the Agency of Hmong Women (University of Minnesota Press, 2016), and her writings have been published in positions: asia critique MELUS, Critical Ethnic Studies Journal, and Amerasia Journal. Vang has two collaborative public humanities projects, Refugee Teaching Institute and Asylum for the Arts, which engages with Central Valley communities to tell refugee and immigrant stories for education, arts, and literature. Vang has received several awards to support her research, including the UC Multicampus Research collaborative grant and the Whiting Foundation Public Engagement grant. She serves as co-editor of the Critical Refugee Studies Collective book series with the University of California Press.
Jiajing Wang is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology. Wang is an anthropological archaeologist whose research investigates the origins and spread of agriculture, food and cuisines, and cultural contact. She studies these topics by applying methods in paleoethnobotany, use-wear analysis, and experimental archaeology. Her current research projects are focused on the origins of rice farming in China, ancient beer production and consumption, and the application of microfossil analysis in historical archaeology.
*Participants are listed in alphabetical order by their last names.