AAAS 2012 Board Election
President-Elect
Linda Trinh Võ, University of California, Irvine
Since 2000 I have been a professor in the Dept of Asian American
Studies at the University of California, Irvine, serving as chair
from 2007-2010. I received my Ph.D. in Sociology at UC San
Diego where I worked as a Teaching Assistant in the newly formed
Ethnic Studies Dept. I continued on as a UC Berkeley Chancellor’s
Postdoctoral Fellow in the Ethnic Studies Dept. While I taught at
Oberlin College and Washington State University, I benefitted
from mentoring programs sponsored by East of California. My
publications include, Mobilizing an Asian American Community,
co-edited books (Intersections and Divergences: Contemporary
Asian American Communities, Asian American Women: The
“Frontiers” Reader, and Labor Versus Empire: Race, Gender, and
Migration) and edited or co-edited special issue journals (Amerasia
Journal, Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, & Ethnicities
Journal). I serve as an editor for the Asian American History &
Culture series published by Temple University Press. My contributions to the AAAS include
former Pacific Northwest Board Member & current Southern California Board Member, Cochair of the Program Committee, serving on 5 program committees & 1 site committee,
chair/member of the Social Science Book Award, Engaged Scholarship Award, & Lifetime
Achievement Award committees, and Advisory Board Member of the Journal of Asian
American Studies. I am the faculty mentor for the new Vietnamese American Oral History
Project that sponsors a 3-year postdoctoral fellowship and have worked with numerous
community organizations, including serving as an Executive Committee Member of the
Vietnamese International Film Festival.
The AAAS has truly been my intellectual home through my academic journey and my
candidacy is my way to give back to an association that has fostered my career. Asian American
Studies is being re-imagined and our association can do more to be inclusive of scholars from
diverse disciplines and build connections with all our communities. My hope is that the
association will continue to be an intellectual space where we can engage one another in
productive and innovative ways and nurture a new generation of scholars and advocates. My
goal is to strengthen the AAAS as a professional organization and provide more benefits to its
members.
Mid-Atlantic Representative
Jennifer Hayashida, Hunter College-CUNY
Jennifer Hayashida is Director of the Asian American Studies
Program (AASP) at Hunter College, The City University of New
York, the only program of its kind in the 23-campus CUNY
system. Her collaborative and individual work as an artist, writer,
and translator has been published and exhibited in the U.S. and
internationally. Fields of interest include representations of the
immigrant and the welfare state, cross-genre literary practices,
experimental documentary film/video, and Asian American
community activism.
As an Asian American Studies scholar, educator, and
administrator, I have worked to productively navigate the
institutional, political, and social issues currently confronting
higher education. As someone in a combined faculty/administrator
position at a public university, the skills and knowledge I possess
reflect my work to expand and sustain Asian American studies in a grim economic and political
environment. As Director of Hunter’s AASP, I have in four years tripled our course offerings,
developed a relevant and dynamic curriculum that reflects shifts in the field, initiated programs
that pair community organizations with the college, and secured a place for the AASP in college
governance. Moreover, I have been an advocate for the needs and interests of our students of
color and working-class students in general, and our API students in particular. I am deeply
committed to nurturing undergraduate scholarship and am especially invested in the academic
experiences of first-generation immigrant students in public higher education. I consider the
aforementioned institutional and social issues essential to innovating the field and rethinking
traditional academic cultures, from a scholarly as well as administrative vantage point, and I
hope that my ideas and skills will benefit the work of the AAAS board and members.
Southern California Representative
Stellah Oh, Loyola Marymount University
Stella Oh is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Women’s Studies at Loyola
Marymount University. She received her doctorate at the
University of California, Irvine in the Department of English
and Comparative Literature. Professor Oh’s area of expertise
is Asian American literature and aesthetics. She has
presented her work on race, gender, and narrative ethics at
several international conferences. Her research has also
appeared in numerous peer-reviewed journals such as LIT:
Literature Interpretation Theory, AJWS: Asian Journal of
Women’s Studies, and Concentric: Literary and Cultural
Studies. She has also contributed chapters to anthologies
including Mine Okubo: Following Her Own Road, and Passage to Manhattan: Critical Essays
on Meena Alexander. Professor Oh also co-organized The World Conference on Japanese
Military Sexual Slavery in 2007 which addressed war crimes and violence against women. In
addition to her scholarly pursuits, Professor Oh actively works with the Korean American
community on issues of sex trafficking. She is currently working on her book manuscript which
explores racial and gender formations of Asian Americans during the Cold War. Professor Oh
teaches Asian American Women’s Experience, Feminist Theories, Literature by Women of
Color, and Women of Color in the United States.
I am interested in serving as a board representative for the Southern California Region to the
Association for Asian American Studies. I have long been a member of AAAS and have also
served as a member of the site committee for the AAAS annual conference in Los Angeles in
2005 and as a member of the program committee for the AAAS annual conference in New York
in 2007. My experiences as an Asian American feminist scholar and teacher have shaped the
ways in which I try to address the various needs of the Asian American community which
involve the intersections of race, ethnicity, gender, class, and sexuality. I have facilitated
communication and scholarly exchange by organizing several conferences that address these
intersections, notably the conference on Japanese Military Sexual Slavery, which brought NGOs,
scholars, and surviving comfort women from several different countries. I am honored for this
nomination and hope to continue to serve the Asian American community as the representative
for the Southern California Region to the AAAS.
Pacific Northwest/Hawai'i/Pacific Islands/Western Canada
Representative
Roderick Labrador, University of Hawai‘I, Mānoa
Rod Labrador is a 1.5-generation Filipino
American—he was born in the Philippines
and immigrated to the U.S. during
elementary school, growing up in southeast
San Diego. He is a graduate of the
University of Rochester (BA), University of
Hawai‘i at Mānoa (MA), and earned his
doctorate in anthropology from UCLA. Prior
to his current position as an assistant
professor in the Department of Ethnic
Studies at the University of Hawai‘i at
Mānoa, he worked for nearly a decade as the
director of a university-based college access
program in a low-income, urban Honolulu
community comprised primarily of Filipinos, Samoans, and Native Hawaiians. He has lived and
worked in Honolulu for nearly the past 20 years. From 1999-2004, he was the co-director (with
Erin Kahunawaika’ala Wright) of the UCLA Hawai‘i Travel Study Program and he has been
been the sole director of the summer program since 2005. His research and community work
focuses on race, ethnicity, class, culture, language, migration, education, hip hop, and cultural
production in Hawai‘i, the US, and the Philippines.
I attended my first AAAS conference in 1995 when I was still a graduate student and since then,
I have presented at numerous conferences and even served on programming and planning
committees. Even though I am academically trained in anthropology, I have always found AAAS
to be open, welcoming, and supportive of scholars from other disciplines as well as graduate
students and community organizers. I have seen changes, challenges, and growth in the
association over the years. If elected, I would help the association continue its growth, focusing
on expanding interethnic, interracial, and interdisciplinary engagement, especially with Hawaiian
Studies, Pacific Islander Studies, and Native American and Indigenous Studies. Serving as a
representative will enable me to actively participate in AAAS's expansion while giving me the
opportunity to provide the same kinds of support that the association has given me.
Chris Lee, University of British Columbia
Chris Lee is Assistant Professor of English at the University of British
Columbia, where he teaches courses in Asian North American
literature, critical race theory, and Asian diaspora studies. He is the
author of The Semblance of Identity: Aesthetic Mediation in Asian
American Literature (forthcoming from Stanford University Press)
and articles in Amerasia, Journal of Asian American Studies,
Canadian Literature, Modern Fiction Studies, Router, and differences.
His current research, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities
Research Council of Canada, focuses on the trans-Pacific circulation
of literary thought during the Cold War and formations of “Asia” in
various colonial diasporic sites; he is also participating in a
collaborative interdisciplinary project (visual arts, ethnography, and
cultural theory) on comparative forms of migration in China and
North America. At UBC, he also serves as Associate Principal of St.
John’s College, where his work focuses on building ties with underrepresented community and arts groups.
I attended my first AAAS conference as an undergraduate and since then, AAAS has been my
primary academic community. I am continually inspired by its commitment to scholarship and
advocacy, and I am running for the board because I would like to contribute to the organization
in a more direct manner. I am especially interested in opening up its activities to include more
members located outside the United States. The international character of AAAS is one of its
strongest assets; with the growth of fields such as Asian Canadian and Asian Australian Studies,
as well as strong interest in Asian American Studies outside the U.S., the association can play a
key role in facilitating and promoting transnational conversations. In recent years, I have been
involved in building the field of Asian Canadian Studies. In 2007, I co-organized (with Henry
Yu) the “Refracting Pacific Canada” conference, which included participants from Canada, the
US, and Asia and this past summer, I co-organized (with Roland Coloma and Christine Kim) the
first Asian Canadian Graduate Workshop to facilitate networking among early career
researchers.
Graduate Representative
Jenny Le, Texas A&M University, Sociology
I am currently a third year doctoral student in sociology at
Texas A&M University in College Station, TX. I very much
hope to return to the midwest where I was born and raised,
especially to my beloved Twin Cities, after my stint in Texas
for graduate school. I plan to teach at the university level.
As for my studies, for my Master's thesis I studied the
religiosity of Vietnamese Americans in the Houston and
Minneapolis communities. For my dissertation I am studying
the social and cultural identities of multiracial Asians and
their subsequent social networks. My background and
upbringing had a huge impact on my choice of research. I am
very proud of my Vietnamese heritage and want to study the
API community through the lens of sociology and social
psychology. It is my mission to bring Asian and Asian
American people and issues to the attention of academia and
society. While this is a lofty goal for one student/researcher/tutor/lecturer/future professor, I truly
believe that one person can make a difference. Through my various roles I can open the eyes of
numerous others.
I feel that being the Graduate Student Representative would give me that chance. My experience
at the New Orleans conference was a wonderful experience. To be around so many Asian
American scholars was genuinely uplifting and inspiring. As I am one of the few Asian
American scholars in my own department, it was a breath of fresh air to be in that environment
and engage with leading scholars.
This is not an opportunity that will simply add a line to my CV. I feel very strongly about the
API community and wish to enhance scholarship and awareness of our issues. I am a highly
motivated individual willing to take on responsibilities that are dear to my heart. The Asian
American community is diverse in so many ways and I cherish it for that. I fully support the
efforts of AAAS. Additionally, I would like to improve the Texas A&M University community's
awareness of API issues. Our current Asian Studies program is very limited. Perhaps through my
involvement with AAAS I will be able to improve our lacking program.
I believe that I could bring many great qualities to the position of Graduate Student
Representative to AAAS. I truly hope you agree.
Pahole Sookkasikon, University of HawaiʻI, Mānoa, American Studies
I recently received my Masters in Asian/American Studies
at San Francisco State University, and I am currently a
first year PhD student in American Studies at the
University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. My research interests
include the identity formation of Thai/Americans, Cultural
Studies, as well as the diaspora of Southeast Asian
communities in the U.S. Academically and within these
varied interests, my goal is to bridge the gap between Thai
Studies and Thai/American Studies, further building upon
the face of a Southeast Asian/American curriculum. In
application, I used my academic background to panel and
lecture at various conferences—including the past 3
AAAS gatherings—as well as published articles on human
trafficking; Thai narrative folktale; the haunting sexploitation of Thai and Thai/American-female
bodies on screen; and my small undertaking, the API/A Love Letter Project. Supplemental to the
previously listed work, I campaigned for various community organizations such as Save the Thai
Temple, Helping Janet, Project Michelle, Hyphen Magazine, in addition to working with the San
Francisco International Asian American Film Festival for five years. As your graduate
representative, I will and would bring my active responsiveness to our community; a welcoming
outlook upon the ever-changing face of the Asian/American academe; in addition to my stellar
hard work. I hope you will consider me as your next AAAS graduate rep in 2012!
As Graduate Representative for AAAS, I know that I am well-qualified and diversified in
experience to be an ideal candidate for the organization. My professional history ranges from
managing a thriving Thai restaurant; utilizing my social skills and abundant networks in the nonprofit, academic, and corporate sectors as the PR Manager for the grassroots organization, Save
the Thai Temple; in addition to working for the SF International Asian/American Film Festival in
Development as well as the Volunteer Coordinator—managing a 400+ volunteer team and a staff
of four. From these positions, I translated my diligent work ethic to my current position as the
Public Relations Coordinator for the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at the University of
Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. In my current position, I employ a variety of characteristics that allow our
organization to succeed—networking across various campuses in the U.S. as well as
internationally; maintaining our newsletter; our highly followed social networks (i.e. Twitter and
Facebook); as well as connecting with numerous departments, faculty, and students. As you can
tell, the experiences aforementioned gave me the passion and capabilities that will no doubt be
an asset to AAAS if given the chance. Thank you for your consideration.
Phi Su, University of California, Los Angeles, Sociology
Greetings! My name is Phi Hong Su, and I am a 2nd year PhD
student in the Sociology Department at the University of California,
Los Angeles. Under the guidance of Professor Min Zhou, I am
pursuing research on international migration; politics; ethnic
communities; and diaspora/transnationalism.
I have had the immense pleasure of attending and volunteering at
AAAS since early in my undergraduate experience. As a result, I
have made dear friends and colleagues who have played an integral
role in my pursuit of graduate studies. I'm eager to work toward
fostering the same sense of community and support I’ve received,
and hope that I can advance mentoring initiatives and collaboration
through serving as Graduate Student Representative. I am
appreciative of the opportunity I have had to serve as Student
Representative for the American Sociological Association Section on
Asia and Asian America, an experience that solidified for me the importance of institutionalizing
knowledge and opportunities for aspiring scholars. If elected to AAAS board, I will strive to
include graduate student voices and ideas in creating a working database of successful fellowship
applications, resources, and other useful tools, and will work to gauge interest in and encourage
interdisciplinary dialogue through a student mini-conference. I am deeply committed to bridging
dialogue and research in the humanities and social sciences, and will approach these goals with
diligence, enthusiasm, and flexibility. Thank you for your consideration!
James Zarsadiaz, Northwestern University, History
James Zarsadiaz is a doctoral candidate in the Department of
History at Northwestern University. He specializes in Asian
American studies, comparative urban/suburban studies, oral
history, and cultural studies. His dissertation examines the
relationship between sub/urban planning, immigration, and
myths of the frontier and U.S. West in post-WWII Southern
California. James has forthcoming work in Amerasia Journal
and Journal of Social History, and is a 2010 recipient of the
Northwestern Lacey Baldwin Smith Prize for Teaching
Excellence. He holds a B.A. in American Studies and Political
Science from George Washington University. James is
originally from Walnut, California.
Graduate students of the Association for Asian American Studies play a significant role in the
larger community. Grad students’ representation in the classroom, in the arts, in social justice
and local affairs, and at conferences attest to their commitment in highlighting the presence and
urgency of Asian American Studies. As graduate representative, I intend to help spearhead
professional development initiatives and conference panels on matters of pedagogy, publishing,
and how to secure and build an academic or public sector career with an Asian American Studies
background. I have previous experience in academic service and conference programming as a
former graduate representative of the American Studies Association and as a founder of the
Ethnic Studies Graduate Student Committee at Northwestern. During my tenure as graduate
representative, I will propose more inclusive grad-targeted events at AAAS annual
meetings. Conferences, especially for first-time attendees, are intimidating. A warmer
welcoming reception and other programming where fellow students across disciplines can
network strengthens ties within the greater AAS community. I will be as accessible as
possible (Please pull me aside or e-mail me [I will probably be at a coffeehouse like you!]). I
hope to serve and lobby for the concerns of AAS graduates.