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Asian American Studies
College of Arts & Sciences
130 S. Woodlawn Kirkwood Hall 104
Bloomington IN, 47405-7104
(812) 855-1646
aasp@indiana.edu

People

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Faculty

Faculty Member	Research Areas
Yvette Alex-Assensoh Associate Professor yalex@indiana.edu Associate Professor Department of Political Science	Focuses broadly on the impact that contexts – including family, historical, economic, political, religious and most recently legal – have in facilitating, creating, ordering and transforming the way that people think and behave politically. As a result, her research is decidedly interdisciplinary because it draws on the perspectives of political science, sociology, history and the law. It moves beyond a focus on the individual to focus on the actions of the elite, the working of the political economy, the presence of history and the overarching influence of the law. Her current project focuses on the implications of the new immigration for theories of racial politics in America, with a focus on Asian American immigration.
Purnima Bose Associate Professor pbose@indiana.edu Associate Professor, English Director, Cultural Studies Program	Literary theory, globalization, and post colonial and comparative ethnic literatures. Her book, Organizing Empire (Duke 2003), examines colonial, Irish and Indian feminist and nationalist constructions of individualism and collective agency. Her articles on South Asian feminism and the diaspora, nationalism, and globalization have appeared in Genders, Passages, Concerns, GLOBAL SOUTH, and Haunting Violations. Her co-authored essays with Laura E. Lyons on colonial personnel circuits and corporate globalization have appeared in boundary 2 and Against the Current. She serves on the editorial board of Genders, SAMAR (South Asian Magazine for Action and Reflection), and SAGAR (South Asia Graduate Research Journal).
Gerald Campano Assistant Professor hcampano@indiana.edu Assistant Professor Department of Language Education	Gerald Campano’s research and teaching interests include practioner inquiry, literacy studies, urban education, immigrant identities in the context of schooling, and Filipina/o American Studies.
Denise Cruz Assistant Professor cruzd@indiana.edu Assistant Professor English and American Studies	I am primarily interested in questioning categorical boundaries of gender, sexuality, geography, and chronology that have determined the ways in with we study imperial intersections within Asian/American, ethnic American, and, more broadly, other U.S. literatures. As a scholar trained in literary studies, I am also fascinated by narrative strategies in works of literature and in the critical narratives that we use to discuss them. Fusing these interests, my current project, Transpacific Femininities: Unmapping Narratives of Philippine Contact, theorizes productions of mixed-race or mixed-culture women as the center of Filipina/o nationalist literature. This archival study examines some of the first works produced by Filipina/os who traveled between the U.S. and Philippines, held graduate-level degrees from U.S. institutions, and published in both countries. Through comparative, transpacific reading practices, I destabilize categories formerly conceived by critics as mutually exclusive: pre-1965 Asian/American literature, transnational feminism, and literary cultural nationalism.
Debra Kang Dean Lecturer, Asian American Studies debdean@indiana.edu	Debra Kang Dean is the author of Back to Back (1997), a chapbook of poems, and two full-length collections from BOA Editions: News of Home (1998) and Precipitates (2003). Her poems have been featured online at The Writer’s Almanac, Poetry Daily, and Verse Daily; they have also been published in a number of anthologies, including Unsettling America, Best American Poetry, The New American Poets, Yobo, and Yellow as Tumeric, Fragrant as Cloves. Her personal essays have appeared in New England Review, Tar River Poetry, Many Mountains Moving, and in the anthology Under Western Eyes.
Ilana Gershon Assistant Professor igershon@indiana.edu Assistant Professor Communication and Culture	My previous research has compared Samoan migrant experiences in New Zealand and the United States, focusing in particular on the contrasts between how governments and migrants understand what it means to have a culture. I have two current research projects. In my long-term research project, I look at Maori members of the New Zealand parliament, exploring how indigenous self-representation in the national legislature has contributed to the current Maori Renaissance. In my short-term project, I am studying how people end relationships using new forms of communication. By studying breaking up, I hope to gain an understanding of when and how people experience new media as "new".
Karen M. Inouye Assistant Professor kinouye@indiana.edu Lecturer American Studies	In my courses, I ask students to think about the tensions between civil liberties and national security during times of crisis and the experience of Asian Americans during these periods. I also teach courses on the history of race and labor in the U.S. with a focus on comparative ethnic histories. My own research interests include Asian Americans and Social Scientific Practice, Comparative Asian American Experience, Asian Americans and Temporality, History of Trauma, and Internment of Japanese Americans.
Jennifer C. Lee Assistant Professor lee484@indiana.edu Assistant Professor Department of Sociology	Sociology of education, work and labor market stratification, and Asian American communities. Jennifer has recently published research on high school employment and dropout, and her current research investigates Asian employment in ethnic economies in the United States. In other research, she examines high school employment patterns and educational attainments of children of immigrants.
Joan Pong Linton Interim Director jlinton@indiana.edu Associate Professor of English	I am generally interested in the diverse ways literary and cultural productions relate to history and theory. I have written on gender and the literary formations of English colonialism, the romance, early modern women writers. My current research on trickster agency and trickster poetics in early modern England feeds my passion for narrative, storytelling, and the figural politics of theater. And I'm still working my way back to the trickster that launched my critical imagination, the Chinese Monkey in its diasporic transmissions.
Fernando F. Ona Assistant Professor ffona@indiana.edu Assistant Professor Applied Health Science, HPER	I teach epidemiology and environmental health and my research interests are in social epidemiology, environmental health and the sociomedical sciences. One of my research interests concerns critical public health issues of Asian Americans. For example, I conducted an ethnographic study that examined the cultural experience of suicide among Asian American young adults. I have a commitment to encouraging Asian American students to enter the diverse field of public health and other health professions.
Angela Pao Associate Professor acpao@indiana.edu Associate Professor Dept. of Comparative Literature	Theatre and performance theory, intercultural theatre and cross-cultural representations, 19th-century French cultural studies, literatures of ethnic minorities, and diasporic literature and culture. She is the author of The Orient of the Boulevards: Exoticism, Empire and 19th-Century French Theatre (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998) and articles on race and gender in 20th-century American theatre. Currently, she is working on a second book No Safe Spaces: Re-Casting Race, Ethnicity and Nationality, which examines non-traditional casting practices and new dramatic forms in relation to theories of individual and collective cultural identity.
Radhika Parameswaran Associate Professor rparames@indiana.edu Associate Professor School of Journalism	South Asia, feminist cultural studies, gender and media globalization, and postcolonial studies. Her recent publications have appeared in Communication, Culture, and Critique, Journal of Communication Inquiry, Critical Studies in Media Communication, Communication Theory, Qualitative Inquiry, Communication Review, and Journalism & Communication Monographs.
Michael Robinson Professor robime@indiana.edu Professor East Asian Languages & Cultures Adjunct Professor History	My research is focused on modern Korea in the early to mid-20th century. I have a particular interest in the period of colonial rule between 1910-1945. My early work was in the field of intellectual and political history of the Korean nationalist movement in the 1920s. Since the late 1980s, I have shifted towards an examination of the cultural history of Korea during the period of Japanese rule, and toward a more general study of the links between popular culture, group identity, and political elites. I am currently writing a monograph on the origins, evolution, and significance of broadcasting during the colonial period. My teaching draws from my general background as a Koreanist trained in the modern history of the East Asian region. I offer courses on Korean civilization, modern Korean history, the history of Asian immigration to the U.S., cultural identity and nationalism in East Asia, and East Asian popular culture. I also work with graduate students in Japanese and Chinese history, literature, and culture as well as students from Cultural Studies, Folklore, and Anthropology.
Samrat Upadhyay Associate professor Associate professor Department of English	Samrat Upadhyay is the first Nepali-born fiction writer writing in English to be published in the West, and the recipient of numerous prestigious awards. His first book, the short story collection ARRESTING GOD IN KATHMANDU (2000, 2001) has been translated into French and Greek.. His stories have been read live on National Public Radio and published widely as well as in Scribner’s Best of the Writing Workshops edited by Sherman Alexie, and Best American Short Stories edited by Amy Tan. Upadhyay's second book, the novel THE GURU OF LOVE (2003) was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year 2003, and a finalist for the 2004 Kiriyama Prize. His recent story collection, THE ROYAL GHOSTS, won the 2007 Asian American Literary Award and the Society of Midland Authors Award in fiction. It was also a finalist for the Ohioana Book Award. The Los Angeles Times marks him as "among the smoothest and most noiseless of contemporary writers."
Indermohan Virk Lecturer Department of Sociology	Social theory, race and ethnicity, public spaces, and constructions of Asian American identity. In addition to courses on Social Theory, Race and Ethnic Relations that I teach in Sociology, I have also taught courses on Asian American Immigration History and Experiences. I am a co-editor of Classical Sociological Theory and Contemporary Sociological Theory.
Y. Joel Wong Assistant Professor E-Mail Assistant Professor Counseling and Counseling Psychology programs	I teach counseling theories, counseling skills, and multicultural counseling in the Counseling and Counseling Psychology programs at IU. One of my main research interests is the psychology of Asian Americans. My previous and current research projects have focused on Asian American mental health issues. For example, I am currently working on a study examining factors associated with Asian Americans’ suicide ideation. I also have an interest in Asian American adolescent outcomes.
Ellen Wu Assistant Professor wue@indiana.edu Assistant Professor Department of History	The questions that I am currently exploring in my work deal with issues of race, immigration, citizenship, and nation through the lens of Asian American history. My book manuscript-in-progress takes as its central problematic the changing race and citizenship status of Chinese and Japanese Americans after the end of Asiatic exclusion in the 1940s and 1950s. I examine Asian American racial formation in the context of both the Cold War and Civil Rights movement as a way to suggest that racialization, citizenship, and nation-building in the mid-20th century United States were inextricably intertwined processes informed by both domestic and international concerns. As a faculty member of the emerging Asian American Studies program on campus, I will be offering a range of courses that examine the political, social, and cultural history of Asian Americans and how these experiences can offer insight into broader issues of race, citizenship, migration, and nationalism/transnationalism.

Staff

Staff Member	Brief Bio
Arnell Hammond Academic Advisor (812) 855-6270 gndradv@indiana.edu	Arnell Hammond is an academic advisor for the Departments of Gender, Latino, and African American and African Diaspora Studies. Her office is located in Memorial Hall East, Room M021. Walk-in office hours are: Monday and Thursday, 9am-noon and Tuesday and Wednesday, 1-4pm.
Jason Nguyen Graduate Assistant / Webmaster jrnguyen@indiana.edu	Jason Nguyen is a graduate student in the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology at Indiana University, Bloomington. His areas of interest include music and culture of Vietnam and the Vietnamese diaspora, Asian-Americans and popular media, and new technologies and global media flows. Related theoretical concerns include identity, representation, politics and power, cultural policy, and the production of meaning. Jason is also an active musician and blogger.
Bertrand Teo