Speakers

Gaiutra Bahadur

Gaiutra Bahadur is an American journalist and book critic who writes frequently about the culture and politics of global migration. Her reporting, criticism and essays have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Washington Post Book World, The Nation, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The (London) Observer and Ms., among other publications. A former daily newspaper staff writer, Bahadur has told the stories of asylum seekers and immigrants in Philadelphia and its suburbs and reported from Baghdad, Iraqi refugee outposts in Syria and Jordan, and the U.S.-Mexico border. She was born in Guyana and immigrated to the United States with her family at the age of six. Bahadur studied literature at Yale and journalism at Columbia and was a 2007-2008 Nieman Fellow at Harvard. Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture (University of Chicago Press, 2013) is her first book. In 2013, she won awards from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, the national feminist arts organization. The book was a finalist for the UK’s prestigious Orwell Book Prize, for political writing that is artful, and won the 2014 Gordon K. and Sybil Lewis Prize, awarded by the Caribbean Studies Association to the best book about the Caribbean published in the previous three years. Coolie Woman was also one of three nonfiction finalists for the Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature.

Anita Baksh

Anita Baksh received her Ph.D. in English from the University of Maryland, College Park. She is an Assistant Professor at LaGuardia Community College, and she has taught literature and writing courses at the University of Maryland and at St. John’s University. Her teaching and research focus on Caribbean literature, South Asian diasporic literatures, postcolonial theory, and feminist theory. Her publications include two articles, “Breaking with Tradition: Hybridity, Identity and Resistance in Indo-Caribbean Women’s Writing” in Bindi: The Multifaceted Lives of Indo-Caribbean Women (edited by Rosanne Kanhai) and “Indian Womanhood in Novels by Naipaul and Espinet” in Defying the Global Language: Perspectives in Ethnic Studies (edited by Cheryl Toman). 

Sayu Bhojwani

Sayu Bhojwani is the President and Founder of The New American Leaders Project (NALP), the only national organization specifically focused on preparing first- and second-generation immigrants for civic leadership. For that work, she has been recognized by the Case Foundation as a Fearless Changemaker, honored by Citizens Union New York, and awarded the BMW Foundation’s Young Leaders Award in 2013. From 2002 to 2004, she was New York City’s first Commissioner of Immigrant Affairs, under Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, and in 1997 she founded South Asian Youth Action (SAYA!), the first and only organization working with South Asian youth. Bhojwani is a frequent contributor to the Huffington Post, CNN In America, and other online publications and currently serves on the boards of the National Immigration Forum and The Afterschool Corporation. Bhojwani holds a Ph.D. in Politics and Education and a M.Ed. in Comparative Education from Columbia University. She is currently a Visiting Scholar at the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University. Bhojwani is a naturalized citizen of the United States. She was born in India and grew up in Belize. She moved to New York City in 1984, and currently lives there with her husband and daughter.

Curtis Chin

A graduate of the University of Michigan, Curtis Chin has written for shows on ABC, the Disney Channel and Nickelodeon, as well as projects for NBC and Fox. He has won awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the San Diego Asian American Film Foundation, among others. As a community organizer, he co-founded the Asian American Writers Workshop and Asian Pacific Americans for Progress. In 2008, he served on Barack Obama’s Asian American Leadership Council where he participated in helping the campaign reach out to the Asian American community. He has appeared on MSNBC, CNN, and NPR, and in Newsweek and other media outlets.

Augusto Espiritu

Augusto Espiritu received his PhD from UCLA. He is the former head of the Department of Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he is associate professor of history and Asian American studies and an affiliate of the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies and the Center for East Asian and Pacific Studies. He is the author of Five Faces of Exile: The Nation and Filipino American Intellectuals (Stanford University Press, 2005). He has also taught for the shipboard education program, Semester at Sea. His book in progress is titled, “In Defense of Spain: Resistance to American Empire in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines.”  

Tao Leigh Goffe

A PhD Candidate in American Studies at Yale University, Tao Leigh Goffe was born in South London. Her dissertation looks at Afro-Asian intimacies in the Americas through the lens of photography and literature. From Islamic hip-hop to yellowface and postcolonial theory, her research explores the intersections between black and Asian subcultures in Britain, the Caribbean, and the United States.

Fredy González

Fredy González is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University of Colorado, Boulder. González specializes in the history of modern Latin America, and his research focuses on the Chinese community in Mexico during the twentieth century. His dissertation, “We Won’t Be Bullied Anymore: Chinese-Mexican Relations and the Chinese Community in Mexico, 1931-1971,” won the Arthur and Mary Wright Prize for outstanding dissertation. He has published an article, “Chinese Dragon and Eagle of Anáhuac: The Local, National, and International Implications of the Ensenada Anti-Chinese Campaign of 1934” in The Western Historical Quarterly 44:1 (Spring 2013), which won the Bert M. Fireman Award from the Western History Association.

Koichi Hagimoto

Koichi Hagimoto is Assistant Professor of Spanish at Wellesley College. His recent book, Between Empires: Martí, Rizal and the Intercolonial Alliance (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), compares the anti-imperial literature and history of Cuba and the Philippines in the late nineteenth century. He has published articles in Transmodernity, Hipertexto, Latin American Literary Review, Hispania, among others.

Eric Hung

Eric Hung is Associate Professor of Music History at Westminster Choir College of Rider University in Princeton, New Jersey. His research focuses on Asian American music, recent Chinese music, music and new media, and contemporary music inspired by Balinese gamelan. Current projects include a book on cultural trauma in Asian American music, and articles on parody videos of “Gangnam Style” and Tan Dun’s The Map. Hung has presented his research throughout North America, Europe, East and Southeast Asia, Australia and New Zealand. His writings have been published in such journals as Asian Music, American Music and MusiCultures, and in several edited volumes. Hung is also an active pianist, and Balinese gamelan and erhu player.

Apoorva Jadhav

Apoorva Jadhav is a postdoctoral fellow at the Population Studies Center, University of Michigan. Her research broadly focuses on the linkages among migration, fertility, and population aging in India and the United States. Her dissertation examined these relationships under the backdrop of massive demographic and economic changes underway in India. She has used mixed research methods to study topics in public health and demography in India and Africa such as migration patterns and contraceptive use, domestic violence and reproductive health, and microfinance and antiretroviral treatment for HIV/AIDS. She is currently studying the Indian diaspora in the United States and their relationship to “mainstream” America. She has presented her work at the annual meetings of the Population Association of America, Asian Population Association, and the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population. She received her PhD in Demography from the University of Pennsylvania and Masters in Public Health from Emory University. 

Roanne Kantor

Roanne Kantor is a Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Literature at The University of Texas at Austin. Her dissertation focuses on Latin American authors living in India and comparable experiences of South Asian authors over the course of the twentieth century. Roanne is also a translator and the winner of the 2009 Susan Sontag Prize for Translation.

Julia Katz

Julia Katz received her B.A. in Africana Studies from New York University in 2011. She is a doctoral student in the Department of History at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. Her research examines Asian migration to Hawaii, focusing on intimacies between migrant Asians and indigenous Polynesians, and Asian accommodations to American empire.

Junyoung Verónica Kim

Junyoung Verónica Kim is Assistant Professor of Migration Studies in the Department of Spanish & Portuguese at The University of Iowa. She received a PhD in Latin American Literature with a minor in Comparative Literature from Cornell University. Both transnational and interdisciplinary in scope, her field of research includes modern and contemporary Latin American literature, Latin American and Korean cinema, cultural studies, critical race and gender studies and immigration history. She has published articles on Latin American literary studies, Korean immigration in Argentina, as well as on the impact of globalization on New Wave Latin American cinema. Her book in progress, Asia/Latin America: The Politics of Area Studies, explores the cultural and migratory flows between Latin America and Asia by looking at literature, cinema, and Asian immigration history in Latin America. Her current research expands this project by focusing on Orientalism in contemporary Latin American literature.

Yeon-Soo Kim

Yeon-Soo Kim is Associate Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. Professor Kim specializes in contemporary Spanish literature and culture. Her monograph, The Family Album: Histories, Subjectivities and Immigration in Contemporary Spanish Culture (2005), is an original study of the family album as a critical medium through which to reconsider the attitudes of Spanish society toward its dictatorial past and the Spanish transition to democracy. Her forthcoming Asia and the Asians in the Contemporary Spanish Imaginary investigates the ways in which contemporary narratives, travel writings and films make efforts to avoid exoticizing Asia and Asians and yet establish new types of exoticism in which difference and otherness are undermined by the Self's own cultural effacement. In order to interpret the various types of contemporary exoticism, she scrutinizes travel writings about Asia written shortly after Spain's loss of the Philippines and during Franco when Spain had no substantial contact or interest in Asia. Kim has also published articles that analyze ethical positions in the visual and narrative representations of immigrants.

Chisu Teresa Ko

Chisu Teresa Ko is an Assistant Professor of Spanish at Ursinus College. She completed her Ph.D. at Columbia University. She specializes in Latin American literary and cultural studies with a particular interest on nineteenth-century and contemporary racial discourses in Argentina. Her most recent work focuses on multiculturalism and Asians in Argentina.

Alejandro Lee 

Alejandro Lee is Assistant Professor in the World Languages Department at Central Washington University. He earned his doctoral degree in Hispanic Languages and Literatures and a master’s degree in Library and Information Science from the University of California, Los Angeles. Among his areas of research are the Chinese diaspora in the Americas, paremiology and contemporary Spanish American literature.

Ana Paulina Lee

Ana Paulina Lee received her PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Southern California. Her research and teaching interests include modern Spanish American and Luso-Brazilian literatures, representations of Chinese immigration and culture in Cuban and Brazilian literary and visual production, Luso-Asian studies, postcolonial and decolonial theory. She is currently a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities at Tulane University where she teaches courses on Latin American cultures. After completing the Mellon postdoctoral fellowship, she will join the faculty of Latin American and Iberian Cultures at Columbia University.

Erika Lee

Erika Lee is an American historian, Director of the Immigration History Research Center, and the Rudolph J. Vecoli Chair in Immigration History at the University of Minnesota. Her scholarly specialties include migration, race and ethnicity; Asian Americans; transnational U.S. history; and immigration law and public policy. She has been awarded numerous national and university fellowships and awards for her research, teaching, and leadership. She is the author or co-author of the award winning books Angel Island: Immigrant Gateway to America (with Judy Yung, Oxford University Press, 2010) and At America’s Gates: Chinese Immigration During the Exclusion Era, 1882-1943 (University of North Carolina Press, 2003), as well as many articles on immigration law and Asian American immigration. She is an active public scholar and has been an invited speaker at universities, historical societies, and community organizations around the U.S. and internationally. She is currently finishing a book titled Chasing Dreams: A History of Asian Americans from 1492 to the Present, to be published by Simon & Schuster in 2015.

Debbie Lee-DiStefano

Debbie Lee-DiStefano is Professor of Foreign Languages in the Department of Global Cultures and Languages, Southeast Missouri State University. She is the author of Three Asian-Hispanic Writers from Peru: Doris Moromisato, José Watanabe, Siu Kam Wen (Edwin Mellen Press, 2008). 

Anne-Marie Lee-Loy

Anne-Marie Lee-Loy is an Associate Professor in the English Department at Ryerson University, Toronto, Canada. Her publications include Searching for Mr. Chin: Constructions of Nation and the Chinese in West Indian Literature (Temple University Press, 2010).

Kathleen López 

Kathleen López is Associate Professor in the Department of Latino and Hispanic Caribbean Studies (LHCS) and the Department of History at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. She is the author of Chinese Cubans: A Transnational History (University of North Carolina Press, 2013) and co-editor (with Evelyn Hu-DeHart) of the special issue on “Afro-Asia” of the Afro-Hispanic Review 27.1 (2008). Her research and teaching focus on the historical intersections between Asia and Latin America and the Caribbean, postemancipation Caribbean societies, race and ethnicity in the Americas, and international migration.

Benjamín Narváez

Benjamín Narváez is an Assistant Professor of History and Latin American Studies at the University of Minnesota, Morris. He received his PhD from the University of Texas at Austin in 2010. His research focuses on the experience of Chinese indentured laborers in nineteenth-century Cuba and Peru and their role in the transition from slavery to free labor.

Kavitha Ramsamy

Kavitha Ramsamy holds a PhD in geography and currently teaches in the Africana Studies Department at Rutgers University. Her research is on globalization, transnationalism, migration, and identity with respect to peoples of African origin and South Asian origin, comparatively. As a cultural, urban, and political geographer, she is interested in the issues of race, citizenship, and cosmopolitanism in comparative national contexts. Her scholarship interrogates dominant racial binaries and social movements at the intersection of Black Atlantic Studies and Indian Ocean Studies. She currently teaches courses in Africana Studies on the interlacing histories and geographies of African and Asian peoples in the United States and abroad; racial inequality and economic development; cultural pluralism and democracy; Black migration and urbanization in the US. She has published several articles on her research areas and is currently working on a book titled “South Asians and the Problem of the Color Line: Migration, Race, and Identity in South Africa and the United States.”

Zelideth María Rivas

Zelideth María Rivas is an Assistant Professor of Japanese at Marshall University. Her research focuses on the conception of race through literature written by Asian immigrants in the Americas, as well as the representation of race in Japan in post-World War II literature and film. She is the author of “Narrating Japaneseness through World War II: The Brazilianization, Peruvianization, and U.S. Americanization of Immigrants” (in Expanding Latinidad: An Inter-American Perspective, WVT Wissenchaftilecher Verlag Trier, 2012) and “Projecting Mixed Race: Negotiating, Nostalgia, and the Rejection of Japanese-Brazilian Biracial Children” (in Journal of Asian American Studies 14.3, October 2011). She is also a member of the advisory committee for The Asian American Literary Review Fall 2013 Special Issue on Mixed Race and a member of the Executive Council for the Section for Asia and the Americas of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA).

Roshni Rustomji-Kerns

Roshni Rustomji-Kerns has lived, studied and worked in India, Pakistan, Lebanon, the United States of America and Mexico. Her teaching, research and publications are based mainly on South Asian and South Asian United Statesian literature and the encounters—confrontational or otherwise—between non-dominant socio-political communities in the Americas.

Julia María Schiavone Camacho 

Julia María Schiavone Camacho is Guest Faculty in Gender and the Global South at Sarah Lawrence College. She is the author of Chinese Mexicans: Transpacific Migration and the Search for a Homeland, 1910-1960 (University of North Carolina Press, 2012). Her research focuses on women, gender, and the family and the Chinese diaspora in modern Latin America and the U.S.-Mexican borderlands. Her teaching interests include Latin American women’s and gender history, Latin America as part of the Pacific world, and Asian Latino migration, family, and identity. She is currently working on “Chinese Latinos: Forging the Transpacific Family, Diasporic Community, and Memory,” a scholarly book project, and Pacific Dreams, a manuscript of creative nonfiction. 

Maria Tham

Born in Karachi, Pakistan, Maria Tham spent the first eighteen years of her life there. She completed high school (O’Levels) from St. Joseph Convent School in Karachi. Following that, she graduated from Scripps College, Claremont, CA with a BA in International Relations, and a Masters of International Affairs (MIA) from Columbia University, New York. She was one of 13 contributors to the book Cultural Curiosity, which explores the Chinese diaspora to different countries in the world. In 2013, she won first place for her personal article to the 2013 Silicon Valley Reads essay competition. This article briefly recounts her memories during the Pakistan/India/Bangladesh war of 1971. A marketing professional, she has worked in various industries including non-profit, high-tech and medical. Currently, she lives and works in the Bay Area with her husband and three children.

Elliott Young

Elliott Young is professor of Latin American and Borderlands history at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon. In 2003, he co-founded the Tepoztlán Institute for Transnational History of the Americas, and has attended every year since. Professor Young published two books on borderlands history, Catarino Garza’s Revolution on the Texas-Mexico Border (Duke University Press, 2004), and Continental Crossroads (Duke University Press, 2004), a volume of essays by new scholars in the field. His book Alien Nation: Chinese Migration in the Americas, the Coolie Era to WWII (University of North Carolina Press, 2014) explores the transnational construction of the idea of the “illegal alien” in the Americas.

K. Kale Yu

K. Kale Yu (PhD Columbia University) is Assistant Professor of History at Nyack College. His primary research interests are in ethnic religious communities and Asian and Asian American religious history. His recent publications include a forthcoming book chapter in Crossroads of Asian American Popular Culture.

Lisa Yun 

Lisa Yun is Associate Professor of English and Asian and Asian American Studies at Binghamton University, where she teaches courses on Asians of the Americas, African and Asian intersections, and Chinese diasporic literature, history, and culture. She is the author of The Coolie Speaks: Chinese Indentured Laborers and African Slaves in Cuba (Temple University Press, 2008), a study of the unfree migration of Chinese to Cuba and their experiences of the transition from slavery to free labor. Her work also appears in Transnational Blackness (eds. Marable and Agard-Jones), Afro/Asia: Revolutionary and Cultural Connections (eds. Mullen and Ho) and in journals such as Afro-Hispanic Review, Caribbean Quarterly, Journal of Asian American Studies, Amerasia Journal, Black Issues Book Review, MELUS, among others.