Asian/Pacific/ American Studies Program (APA)

Sony Coráñez Bolton is Associate Professor in Spanish and Latinx and Latin American Studies at Amherst College. Their research draws on Filipinx and Latinx queer cultural theory and critique. Their courses, taught in Spanish, English or a combination of the two(!), intentionally make connections between the fields of Asian American, US Latinx, Black, and indigenous studies. Sony’s research and teaching revolve around the intersection of Spanish colonialism and US imperialism in the Philippines as another “Borderlands” of encounter. Sony received their PhD in American Studies from the University of Michigan. 

Richard T. Chu is Five College Professor of History. He is author of Chinese and Chinese Mestizos of Manila: Family, Identity, and Culture 1860s–1930s (Brill, 2010). Currently, he is working on his next book entitled “Building A Nation, Effacing a Race: The “Chinaman” Question of the United States in the Philippines, 1898-1905” that analyses different newspaper articles dealing with the Chinese in the Philippines during the American colonial period. He teaches courses on the Chinese diaspora, Philippines, U.S. empire in the Pacific, and Asian/Pacific/America. 

Pawan Dhingra is Professor of American Studies and Contributing Faculty in Anthropology/Sociology at Amherst College. He is Former Curator and Senior Advisor to the Smithsonian Institution’s Beyond Bollywood project. His work has been profiled in various outlets, including the film Breaking the Bee, the White House forum on AAPI heritage, National Public Radio, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, Colorlines, Times of India, and more. Publications include the Life Behind the Lobby: Indian American Motel Owners and the American Dream (Stanford University Press, 2012) and Managing Multicultural Lives: Asian American Professionals and the Challenge of Multiple Identities (Stanford University Press, 2007) (both award-winning books). He co-authored, Asian America: Sociological and Interdisciplinary Perspectives (Polity Press, 2014). His latest book project, Hyper Education, explains the politics of educational pursuits by Asian Americans and others. He has been department chair and held tenured positions at Tufts University and Oberlin College. 

Robert Hayashi’s work bridges scholarly and creative registers and explores public and personal narratives of American places and the consequences of these narratives in shaping identity and historical perspective. He is the author of Haunted by Waters: A Journey through Race and Place in the American West (University of Iowa Press, 2007), which was awarded the National Council on Public History Book Award in 2008 and nominated for Orion Magazine's 2008 Book Award. In his forthcoming book project, Fields of Play: Sport, Race, and Memory in The Steel City (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2023), he uses sport as a lens to explore the social and cultural history of the greater Pittsburgh region from the turn of the nineteenth century to the present. He has also published poetry, as well as articles on Japanese American relocation and ecocriticism and from 2014-2017 served on the National Park Service Asian American Pacific Islander Theme Study Scholars Panel. He teaches courses in Asian American studies, ethnic literature, research methods, creative nonfiction, sports studies, and public history and is currently working on a collection of essays and poetry.

Nozomi Nakaganeku-Saito is an Assistant Professor at Amherst College in English and Asian American and Pacific Islander Studies. Her current book project, Under the Roots of the Gajumaru Tree: Seeding Dispossession and Storying Ecologies in Indigenous Okinawa, examines the long arc of US militarism and Japanese settler colonialism and the ecological impacts of their transpacific colonial agreement in Indigenous Okinawa. Weaving together analysis of literature, archival sources, and yuntaku (talk-story), the project shows how the ecologies of Okinawan speak to a larger story of struggles for sovereignty between Indigenous Okinawans, Japanese settlers, and the United States military.

Lili M. Kim is Professor of History and Global Migrations in the School of Critical Social Inquiry at Hampshire College.  She has served as a Fulbright Senior Scholar and Professor of History in the Division of International Studies at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies in Seoul, South Korea during the 2017-2019 academic year.  She was also a Visiting Associate Professor of History and Ethnic Studies at Harvard University in 2010-2011.  She is an interdisciplinary scholar who teaches 20^th-century United States history broadly, focusing on the issues of (im)migration, race, gender, class, nation, and empire. She is currently at work on her book manuscript, In Transit: Migration, Globalization, and Koreans in Argentina and the United States, which traces the history of Korean migration to Argentina that began in 1965 and their remigration to the United States.  Her work has been supported by the NEH, Fulbright, and Whiting Foundation, among others.  Prior to coming to Hampshire College, she has taught at the State University of New York at Buffalo, University of Pennsylvania, and the University of California at Los Angeles.

Noah Romero (Filipinx) is a Five College Assistant Professor of Native American and Indigenous Studies at Hampshire College. He earned his Ph.D. from Waipapa Taumata Rau (The University of Auckland) in the fields of Critical Studies in Education and Māori, and Indigenous Education. Drawing from a transnational constellation of critical, Indigenous, queer, and decolonial ways of knowing and doing, Romero's teaching and research deepens understanding of racialized subjectivity by emphasizing the generative possibilities that occur when Indigenous, immigrant, and dispossessed peoples commune with land, our ancestors, and one another.

Romero's first book, Decolonial Underground Pedagogy: Unschooling and Subcultural Learning for Peace and Human Rights (Bloomsbury), compiles several insider ethnographies that theorize the anti-oppressive pedagogies found in minority-led punk, skateboarding, and unschooling subcultures. Instead of reifying colonial logics like individualism, competition, and consumerism, minority-led subcultures often cultivate community engagement, an understanding of one’s responsibilities, and a shared sense of identity. These findings correlate with experiences of healing and liberation among subcultural insiders with racialized, queer, and nondominant identities, which has significant implications for the development of anti-racist, community-responsive, and decolonial forms of education.

Iyko Day is Elizabeth C. Small Professor and Chair of English, and Interim Chair of the Department of Critical Race and Political Economy at Mount Holyoke College.  She is a faculty member and former co-chair of the Five College Asian/Pacific/American Studies Program.  Day is the author of Alien Capital: Asian Racialization and the Logic of Settler Colonial Capitalism (Duke University Press, 2016) and her essays have appeared in American Quarterly, Amerasia, Monthly Review, and PMLA and magazines such as Art Forum and Brooklyn Rail.  She coedited the special issue “Solidarities of Nonalignment: Abolition, Decolonization, and Anticapitalism” for Critical Ethnic Studies and has edited forums in Verge: Studies in Global Asias and Environment and Planning D: Society and Space.  She currently coedits the book series Critical Race, Indigeneity, and Relationality for Temple University Press and is a member of the Critical Ethnic Studies journal editorial collective.  Her current research focuses on Marxism and racial capitalism, colonialism and nuclear antipolitics, and the visual culture of logistics.

Payal Banerjee is Associate Professor of Sociology at Smith College. Her research focuses on globalization, migration and the centrality of state policies in sculpting the structures of displacement and labor incorporation. Her work on Indian immigrant IT workers in the United States has appeared in Critical Sociology; Race, Gender, and Class; International Feminist Journal of Politics; Irish Journal of Anthropology; Women's Studies Quarterly; Social & Public Policy Review; Man in India and in several edited volumes. Her research on Chinese minorities in India and India-China relations has been published in Huaqiao Huaren Lishi Yanjiu (Overseas Chinese History Studies, in Mandarin), Security and Peace, China Report, and in the book Doing Time with Nehru. Her recent work on hydroelectric power projects and privatization in India has appeared in Perceptions and as a UNRISD Occasional Paper. Banerjee has been a research fellow at the BRICS Policy Center (BPC) in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. She has taught as visiting faculty at the Graduate Program in International Affairs (GPIA), The New School in New York City, and in India at Sikkim University in Gangtok and at FLAME in Pune. 

Naveen Bahar Choudhury is a playwright, librettist, and lyricist, whose work has been produced, commissioned, and/or developed by Ma-Yi Theater, Prospect Theater, Ensemble Studio Theatre, Second Stage Theatre, New Federal Theatre, Martha’s Vineyard Playhouse, Joe’s Pub at The Public Theater, The Lark Play Development Center, New Dramatists, and more. She has been a Dramatists Guild Fellow, a LaGuardia Performing Arts Center Playwriting Resident, and a Mellon Creative Research Fellow/Playwriting Resident at the University of Washington. Her play SKIN is published in Plays For Two, an anthology by Vintage Books/Random House, and was broadcast on Northeast Public Radio as part of the Playing On Air series. Her short musical on film, LADY APSARA, commissioned by Prospect Theater, and written with composer Kamala Sankaram, was presented at the 44th Asian American International Film Festival in 2021. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Theatre at Smith College, and has previously taught playwriting and dramatic literature at Amherst College, Sarah Lawrence College, and The New School for Drama, where she earned her MFA, as well as for the Dramatists Guild Institute and the Enough Plays Project. 

Floyd Cheung is Professor of English Language and Literature and of American Studies at Smith College. His scholarly work focuses on the recovery of lesser-known works of early Asian American literature including H. T. Tsiang's And China Has Hands (Kaya Press, 2016) and John Okada: The Life and Rediscovered Work of the Author of No-No Boy (University of Washington Press, 2018). With Keith Lawrence, he coedited and contributed to Recovered Legacies: Authority and Identity in Early Asian American Literature (Temple University Press, 2005). Also a poet, he has published in journals like Mascara Literary Review and qarrtsiluni, as well as a chapbook, Jazz at Manzanar. 

Jina B. Kim is Assistant Professor of English Language & Literature and of the Study of Women & Gender at Smith College. She received her doctorate in English and women’s studies from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and her bachelor's in studio art and English from Agnes Scott College. She specializes in feminist disability studies, women-of-color feminisms/queer-of-color critique and contemporary ethnic U.S. literatures with an emphasis on feminist-of-color writing and cultural expression post-1968. Prior to joining Smith College, she was a Consortium for Faculty Diversity postdoctoral fellow at Mount Holyoke College in the program in critical social thought.

Jinwon Kim is an assistant professor of sociology at Smith College. Her research and teaching explore themes of urban sociology, Asian and Asian American studies, race and ethnicity, transnational and global sociology, migration, and consumption. She investigates how the global political economy and popular/consumer culture interact with national/ethnic identities, urban changes, and the creative economy in an era of global competition. She just finished her first monograph on Koreatown in Manhattan as a transclave—a transnational space for Seoul-style consumption characterized by intensive flows of people, money, and consumer culture, including pop culture and food, between the U.S. and a sending country. It is expected to be published by NYU Press in 2025. She is currently working on two other book projects. The first project focuses on interethnic and intraethnic relations among Chinese, Koreans, and Korean Chinese (Joseonjok, an ethnic minority group in China whose ethnicity is Korean) in the Asian community in Queens, New York City. The second project, entitled New Trend, Old Conflicts: New Black-Korean Relations in an Era of Global Media, examines anti-Blackness and interracial relations between Black people and Koreans in the Korean media and entertainment industry. In both projects, she employs in-depth interviews, participant observation, and media analysis.

Melissa Parrish is an Assistant Professor of English Language and Literature at Smith College. She specializes in multiethnic American literature with an emphasis on poetry and poetics, and literary representations of public crises from the Cold War to the present. She is currently at work on Situation Normal: Emergency Poetics and the Rise of the National Security State, a book manuscript that queries poetry’s relationship to the way national security has shaped the handling of all public emergencies in the U.S. Prior to coming to Smith, she was a postdoctoral lecturer in the English department at Rutgers University, where she also completed her doctorate in English. Originally from Kaneohe, Hawai’i, she holds prior degrees from Georgetown University and from the United States Military Academy, where she was an all-conference selection in NCAA Division I softball and later served in the U.S. Army before starting her academic work.

Jane Hwang Degenhardt is Professor in the Department of English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Although her work focuses on early modern drama, it is often informed by and in conversation with questions that lie at the heart of Asian American studies. She approaches Shakespeare’s plays trans-historically and places them in conversation with writers of color and theoretical discussions of race and gender. Her undergraduate courses often foreground Asian American and African American writing, particularly as grounds for exploring cultural and inter-generational trauma. Her graduate courses address the historical underpinnings of race as well as its development in relation to changing definitions of the human and emerging templates for the post-human. She is the author of Islamic Conversion and Christian Resistance on the Early Modern Stage (Edinburgh, 2010). She is completing a book entitled Fortune’s Empire: Chance, Providence, and Overseas Ventures in Early Modern English Drama that explores the meaning of chance, luck, and risk--and how these concepts become racialized and gendered--in the context of early English global expansion. She is also beginning a new book project on pluralistic understandings of the concept of “world” that sources its arguments in Shakespeare’s plays as well as in contemporary creative fiction and non-fiction writing, in visual and performance art, and in film and digital media. 

Moon-Kie Jung is Professor of Sociology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He is the author of Reworking Race: The Making of Hawaii's Interracial Labor Movement (Columbia, 2006) and Beneath the Surface of White Supremacy: Denaturalizing U.S. Racisms Past and Present (Stanford, 2015) and coeditor of State of White Supremacy: Racism, Governance, and the United States (Stanford, 2011) and Antiblackness (Duke, 2021). 

Miliann Kang is Professor in Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies and affiliated faculty in Sociology and Asian/Asian American Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She is the author of The Managed Hand: Race, Gender and the Body in Beauty Service Work (University of California Press) and is completing her next book, Mother Other: Race and Reproductive Politics in Asia America. She served for four years as Director of Diversity Advancement for the College of Humanities and Fine Arts. She was a Fulbright Senior Scholar with Ewha University, and a Korea Foundation Fellow with Seoul National University, researching gender, work and family issues in transnational contexts. Her writing has been published in Gender and Society, Contexts, Gender, Work & Organization, The Conversation, Meridians, Newsweek, Women’s Review of Books, Huffington Post, the Korea Times and Ms. Courses that she offers that count for the certificate include: WGSS 340: Asian American Feminisms and WGSS 350: Global Mommy Wars. 

Prof. C.N. Le is a Senior Lecturer II in the Sociology department and also the Director of the Asian & Asian American Studies Certificate Program at UMass Amherst. His main research focuses on using Census data to analyze and compare assimilation outcomes (socioeconomic, marital, residential, and entrepreneurial) among different Asian American ethnic groups, with a particular focus on Vietnamese Americans. He is the author of the book Asian American Assimilation: Ethnicity, Immigration, and Socioeconomic Attainment (2007). He teaches "Bridging Asia and Asian America" every year, along with other courses such as "The Asian American Experience" and "Globalization and Inequality."  He also maintains a website and blog titled Asian-Nation: Asian American History, Demographics, and Culture. 

Asha Nadkarni is Associate Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her research and teaching interests include postcolonial literature and theory, transnational feminist theory, US empire studies, and Asian American studies, with an emphasis on the literatures and cultures of the South Asian diaspora. Her book, Eugenic Feminism: Reproductive Nationalism in the United States and India (Minnesota, 2014), traces connections between U.S. and Indian nationalist feminisms to suggest that both launch their claims to feminist citizenship based on modernist constructions of the reproductive body as the origin of the nation. She is working on a second book project, tentatively titled From Opium to Outsourcing, that focuses on representations of South Asian labor in a global context. 

Mazen Naous is Professor of English at University of Massachusetts Amherst. He holds a BFA from The Boston Conservatory in composition and classical guitar performance, and a PhD from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Before joining the faculty at UMass, he taught at the College of Staten Island, CUNY, the College of Wooster, and the University of Balamand (Lebanon). His teaching and research interests include postcolonial literature and theory, Arab American literature, music and literature, classical and modernist Arabic literature, and translation theory. He has published on Arab American fiction, 19th and 20th-century comparative Anglo-Arab poetry, and postcolonial fiction. Naous recently edited a collection of international, interdisciplinary articles titled Identity and Conflict in the Middle East and Its Diasporic Cultures. His current book project is titled Poetics of Visibility in the Contemporary Arab American Novel. 

Malcolm Sen is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Malcolm’s research areas include postcolonial studies and the environmental humanities with a focus on Irish and South Asian literatures; beyond these his interests range from global anglophone to climate fiction. He is the co- editor (with Lucienne Loh) of Postcolonial Literature and the Challenges for the New Millennium (Routledge, 2016). He is currently completing a book-length study of the transformation of sovereignty at a time of climate chaos: Unnatural Disasters: Literature, Climate Change and Sovereignty. He is the editor of The Cambridge History of the Environment in Irish Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2020). Other forthcoming publications include “Godhuli / Twilight” in Loanwords to Live With in the Anthropocene (University of Minnesota Press, 2019); “Sovereignty at the Margins: The Oceanic Future of the Subaltern” in Representing Poverty and Precarity in a Postcolonial World (Brill, 2019), “Risk and Refuge: Contemplating Precarity in Contemporary Irish Literature” in The Irish University Review  (May 2019), “Particulate Matter and Planetary Aesthetics: Post-Statist Ecologies of James Joyce” in Irish Literature as World Literature (Bloomsbury, 2020). His podcast series, “Irish Studies and the Environmental Humanities,” is available through University College Dublin’s Scholarcast, Google Play and Apple iTunes. His thoughts on zombies and other crucial matters are found in The Chicago Review of Books. 

Caroline H. Yang teaches Asian American literature and African American literature using the framework of critical race studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Her first book, The Peculiar Afterlife of Slavery: The Minstrel Form and the Chinese Worker in American Literature, forthcoming from Stanford University Press in 2020, examines blackface minstrelsy as a US cultural institution that played a crucial role in literary representations of Chinese workers during and after Reconstruction in order to highlight the enduring antiblackness born out of slavery. Her other scholarly publications can be found in Modern Fiction Studies (MFS), MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States, the Journal of Asian American Studies, and Asian American Literature in Transition Volume I (1850-1930), forthcoming from Cambridge University Press in 2020.