Executive Advisory Board Members

Below is a list of the current members of our Executive Advisory Board.


  • Vira Cage (UMass Amherst alum, member of the Massachusetts Asian American Commission, and community activist)
  • Richard T. Chu (Associate Professor and Five College professor in History)
  • Cedric de Leon (Professor in Sociology and Director of the Labor Center)
  • Jim Hicks (Senior Lecturer in Comparative Literature and Editor of the Massachusetts Review)
  • Miliann Kang (Associate Professor in Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies)
  • Asha Nadkarni (Associate Professor in English)
  • Franklin Odo (John J. McCloy '16 Professor of American Institutions and International Diplomacy, Amherst College)
  • Amanda Seaman (Associate Professor in East Asian Languages and Cultures program, Languages, Literatures, and Cultures department)
  • Amilcar Shabazz (Professor in W. E. B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies)
  • Sigrid Schmalzer (Professor in History)
  • Lily Tang (undergraduate Class of 2021)
  • Porntip Israsena Twishime (graduate student in Communication)
  • Michael Sakamoto (Director of Asian and Asian American Arts and Culture Program, Fine Arts Center)
  • Laura Valdiviezo (Professor in Teacher Education and School Improvement and Director of Center for Latin American, Caribbean and Latinx Studies)



Faculty

Below is a list of faculty at UMass Amherst who regularly teach courses that count toward the Asian & Asian American Studies Certificate, and/or whose research interests relate to Asian Studies or Asian American Studies.


Christian Appy
As Professor in History, Prof. Appy is the author of three books about the American War in Vietnam: American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity, (Viking, 2015); Patriots: The Vietnam War Remembered From All Sides (Viking, 2003), and Working-Class War: American Combat Soldiers and Vietnam (University of North Carolina Press, 1993). Patriots won the Massachusetts Book Award for Non-Fiction in 2004. Appy also edits a book series for the University of Massachusetts Press called Culture, Politics, and the Cold War. The series now has more than thirty titles, including Appy’s own edited collection, Cold War Constructions: The Political Culture of United States Imperialism, 1945-1966 (2001). He is located in Herter 718 and can be contacted at appy@history.umass.edu and 413-545-6768.


Theresa Y. Austin
Prof. Austin is a Professor in the Department of Teacher Studies and Curriculum Development in the School of Education. She received her B.A. in 1976, M.A. in 1980, and Ph.D. in 1991, all from the University of California at Los Angeles. Her professional interests include Bilingualism Through Second and Foreign Language Education; Sociocultural Issues in Second Language Learning; Language and Literacy Policy and Planning; Cross-Cultural Pragmatics; Technology-Assisted Language Learning; Foreign Language Teacher Education; ESL/Bilingual Testing and Evaluation. She can be reached at taustin@educ.umass.edu and a copy of her vita is here (485 PDF).


Bruce Baird
Associate Professor in Japanese, Herter 717, 413-577-4992, baird@asianlan.umass.edu


Doris G. Bargen
Prof. Bargen is an Associate Professor of Japanese. She receive her Ph.D. at Tubingen Universitv (Germany) in 1978. Her areas of research are Classical Japanese Literature, Japanese Women writers, Japanese Film, and Japanese Theater. Her teaching responsibilities include Classical & Medieval Japanese Literature, Modern Japanese Literature, Women in Japanese Literature & Film and Classical Japanese. She can be reached in Herter 439, 413-545-4955, and at dgbargen@asianlan.umass.edu.


Deepankar Basu
Prof. Basu is an Associate Professor in the Economics department. His areas of research are in applied econometrics with a focus on Marxian political economy, macroeconomics, economic development, and demography and much of his recent publications focus on economic development and distribution of food in India. He can be reached in 1012 Thompson Hall, 545-6359, and dbasu@econs.umass.edu.


Zen

Briankle Chang
Briankle Chang is an Associate Professor in Communication and his research interests include cultural studies, media criticism, and the philosophy of communication. He can be contacted in Machmer Hall 310 and at 545-3742 or bchang@comm.umass.edu.


Elena Suet-Ying Chiu
Assistant Professor in Chinese, Herter 333, 413-545-5840, and chiu@llc.umass.edu.


Anne Ciecko
Anne Ciecko is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication and a participating faculty member in the Interdepartmental Film Program. Prof. Ciecko has taught the "Bridging Asia & Asia America" colloquium required for certificate students, as well as designed and taught a new course on Asian Pacific American Cinema (Comm 397S). She regularly teaches courses on popular Asian cinema, contemporary world cinema (Comm 397T, every spring), intercultural cinema, international film stars, and women filmmakers. She has also organized and curated annual Asian and Asian American film festivals and symposia at UMASS, and is the faculty coordinator for the popular one-credit Multicultural Film Festival course (Comm 296F), offered every spring. Her research on international cinema, including Asian and Asian diaspora cinemas, has appeared in many scholarly journals and anthologies. Her areas of research are Global cinema, gender studies and critical cultural studies. Her current and ongoing research projects focus on the international film star; diasporic film cultures, especially global reception of popular Indian films (Bollywood); transcultural film, video, and multimedia installations by women. She can be reached at ciecko@comm.umass.edu and 413-545-6348.


Richard Chu
Prof. Chu previously taught at the University of San Francisco and was awarded a Ph.D. from the University of Southern California in December of 2003. Prof. Chu studies the history of ethnic identity in the Philippines, where indigenous pepoles and immigrants from China and the Pacific have negotiated identity -- and power relations -- under a series of empires (Muslim, British, Spanish, American, and Japanese) over centuries. He regularly teaches History 197, "Empire, Race, & the Philippines" here at UMass this fall and other courses on the Philippines and Pacific empires.


Christine Crago
Christine Crago is an Assistant Professor in the Resource Economics department. Her research interests include the development and adoption of renewable energy technologies and how to incentivize the production, adoption, and use of renewable energy. A number of her recent publications have focused on India and the Philippines. She is located in 215 Stockbridge Hall and can be contacted at 413-545-5738 and ccrago@resecon.umass.edu.


Yasmeen Daifallah
Assistant Professor Daifallah is in the Political Science department and she studies Islamic political thought, ancient and modern Western political thought, comparative political theory, postcolonial theory, and Middle East politics. She is located in Thompson 304 and can be contacted at 413-545-4478 and ydaifallah@polsci.umass.edu.


Nilanjana Dasgupta
Associate Professor Dasgupta's work in the Psychology and Brain Sciences Department focuses on the interface of nonconscious social cognition and intergroup relations. She studies how the culture in which people live shapes their mind and affects their overt and covert social behavior toward disadvantaged and advantaged groups. She is located in Tobin Hall 635 and can be contacted at 545-0049 or dasgupta@psych.umass.edu.


Jane Degenhardt
Jane Degenhardt is a Five-College Assistant Professor of English, based at the University of Massachusetts. She has specialties in two fields: English Renaissance drama and Asian American literature. In addition to teaching courses on Shakespeare, she teaches Introduction to Asian American Literature and upper level courses in Comparative Ethnic Literatures, Mixed Race Identity, and Asian Americans and Citizenship in the Early Twentieth Century. She is located in Bartlett Hall 459 and can be contacted at janed@english.umass.edu.


Asian Lion

Yi Feng
Lecturer in Chinese, Herter 515, 413-545-4957, yif@asianlan.umass.edu


Stephen M. Forrest
Stephen M. Forrest is a Senior Lecturer in Japanese. He received his Ph.D. at Harvard University in Japanese Literature. His areas of research include Classical Japanese poetry collections and poetry theory, Japanese poetry abroad, Literature of travel in Pre-modern Japan, publishing, and bibliography in Japan and Manuscript texts. His teaching responsibilities include Introduction to Classical Japanese I (J556H), Manuscript Japanese (J597A), Pre-Modern and Modern Japanese Literature (in translation) (J 144/ComLit 152), Research in Japanese Sources (J570H) and Elementary Research in Japanese Studies (J297A). He can be reached at Herter 441, 413-545-4950, and at sforrest@asianlan.umass.edu.


Piper Gaubatz
Prof. Gaubatz is an Associate Professor in the Geoscience Department. Her research include Urban Studies, China, Japan, and the U.S. She received her B.A, at Princeton, 1984: M.A.. California at Berkeley, 1986: Ph.D. 1989, Prof. Gaubatz is an urban geographer with a background in sociology, architecture and Chinese studies. She also directs the campus-wide Asian Area Studies program. Within the field of urban geography, her research specialization is urban morphology - the analysis of urban form. Her current research projects include The New Chinese City. Urban Restructuring in Contemporary Japan, People and Environment on the Northern Chinese Frontiers. She can be reached at gaubatz@geo.umass.edu.


Christine Ho
Christine I. Ho is an Assistant Professor in the History of Art and Architecture department. She received her BA from Wellesley College and Ph.D. in Art History from Stanford University. She specializes in late imperial, modern, and contemporary Chinese art. Her research focuses on ink painting, aesthetics and politics, global socialist visual culture, and the postsocialist legacy. Additional teaching and research interests include histories of landscape and environment, transnational art movements, public art, and design cultures. Her office is in Bartlett Hall 325B and she can be contacted at 413-545-8712 and christineho@arthist.umass.edu.


Haivan Hoang
Haivan Hoang is an Associate Professor in English and she received her Bachelor's degree from UC Berkeley, her Master's from Cal State Hayward, and her Ph.D. from Ohio State. Her research and teaching interests are in rhetoric and composition. Her office is in Bartlett Hall 267 and she can be contacted at 545-2972 and hhoang@english.umass.edu.


Ge Jian
Ge Jian is faculty in Anthropology and she received her Ph.D. from the University of Washington. Her geographic focus is on China and her work in general explores how language and power interact and operate in the discourses of race/ethnicity, class, gender and disabilities, and the inequalities this interaction generates. Her dissertation is an ethnography of the power dynamics between the international lingua franca English, the national language Mandarin Chinese and the local ethnic minority language Uyghur (a Turkic language) in Xinjiang in Northwestern China, a historically and geopolitically contested Muslim area at the crossroads of Eurasia. She can be contacted at gjian@umass.edu.


Moon-Kie Jung
Moon-Kie Jung is Professor in the Department of Sociology. His areas of research and teaching interest include comparative racial formations, labor, migration, state, empire, and Asian American Studies. He is a co-editor, with João H. Costa Vargas and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, of State of White Supremacy: Racism, Governance, and the United States (2011) and the author of Reworking Race: The Making of Hawaii's Interracial Labor Movement (2006) and Beneath the Surface of White Supremacy: Denaturalizing U.S. Racisms Past and Present (in press). He can be reached at mjung@umass.edu.


Sangeeta Kamat
Prof. Kamat is an Associate Professor in the Department of Educational Policy Research and Administration. She received her B.A. at Sophia College, Bombay, India, 1985; M.A.; The Tata Institute of Social Science, Bombay, India, 1988; Ph.D., University of Pittsburgh, 1998. Her professional interests include globalization and education; critical theory; gender analysis and South Asia. She can be reached at skamat@educ.umass.edu.


Miliann Kang
Prof. Kang is an Associate Professor of the Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies Department and is affiliated with the Sociology Department. She received her B.A. magna cum laude in Social Studies at Harvard University and her M.A. and Ph.D. in Sociology at New York University, 2001. Her research is on Asian immigrant women's work in the service economy and her book, The Managed Hand: Race, Gender, and the Body in Beauty Service Work, focuses on Korean women in the nail salon industry and won multiple awards from several academic associations. Her other areas of interest are the social construction of race, gender and class, Asian American activism, second generation families, and ethnography. She also teaches a course on "Asian American Women: Gender, Race and Immigration." She can be reached at mkang@wost.umass.edu or 413-577-0710.


Mako Koyama-Hartsfield
Senior Lecturer in Japanese, Herter 335, 413-545-4958, mako@llc.umass.edu


Yin and Yang

C.N. Le
Prof. Le is a Senior Lecturer in the Sociology department and also the Director of the Asian & Asian American Studies Certificate Program. His main research focuses on using Census data to describe 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 "The Asian American Experience" and "Bridging Asia and Asian America Colloquium" courses every year and also maintains a website titled Asian-Nation: Asian American History, Demographics, and Culture. He can be reached at and 413-545-4074.


Yu Liu
Lecturer in Chinese, Herter 530, 413-545-6684, liuyu@asianlan.umass.edu


Stephen Miller
Prof. Miller is an Associate Professor of Japanese. Has received his Ph.D. in Japanese Language and Literature from the University of California Los Angeles in 1993. He can be reached at Herter 336, 413-545-0208, and smiller@asianlan.umass.edu.


Asha Nadkarni
Asha Nadkarni is a new Associate Professor in the English Department, having received her Ph.D. from Brown University. Her research and teaching interests include postcolonial literature and theory, transnational feminism, theories of development, nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature (canonical and ethnic), and literatures and cultures of the South Asian diaspora. She is located at Bartlett Hall 491 and can be contacted at 545-5523 or nadkarni@english.umass.edu.


Mazen Naous
As an Assistant Professor in the English department, Prof. Naous has a BFA from The Boston Conservatory, an MA from the University of Massachusetts Boston, and a PhD from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Before coming to 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. He is currently working on a book project, titled The Arab American Novel and Traveling Poetics. He can be reached at mnaous@english.umass.edu and in E356 South College.


Jonathan Corpus Ong
Prof. Ong's work work focuses on the ethics of media, which he approaches as the moral and social consequences of media and communication technologies in the everyday lives of minority groups and vulnerable communities, especially those in the global South. His research develops an ethnographic and decolonial approach that sensitively embeds media practice within rich local histories and ordinary motivations while engaging with normative debates about media justice and cosmopolitan ethics in complex multicultural societies. He is located in N354 Integrative Learning Center and can be contacted at 413 545-1311 and cong@umass.edu.


Priscilla Page
Prof. Page is a writer and dramaturg as well as a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Theater, where she teaches the multicultural theater curriculum and serves a member of the dramaturgy faculty. She also serves as the coordinator for the Multicultural Theater Certificate. She can be contacted at pmpage@theater.umass.edu or the Fine Arts Center, room 107.


Hoang G. Phan
Prof. Phan is an Associate Professor in English and he received his Bachelor's degree from the University of Chicago and his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley. His fields of research include eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American literature, African American literature, Asian American Literature, Marxism, Postcolonial Theory, and Legal-Literary Studies. He is located in Bartlett Hall 291 and can be contacted at 545-2979 or hgphan@english.umass.edu.


Stephen Platt
Professor Platt is a Professor in the History department. His research interests include modern China and nationalism.


J. Mohan Rao
Prof. Rao is a Professor in the Economics department. His areas of research include development theory, globalization, theory of the state, and developing agriculture and a number of his recent publications focus on India and Bangladesh. He can be reached in 806 Thompson Hall, 545-4808, and rao@econs.umass.edu.


Sigrid Schmalzer
Prof. Schmalzer is a Professor in the History department. She received her Ph.D. from the University of California, San Diego in 2004 and her fields of interest include modern Chinese history, history of science, and history of popular culture. Professor Schmalzer has published two articles on the interactions between scientific and local forms of knowledge in rural Chinese communities, entitled "Breeding a Better China: Pigs, Practices, and Place in a Chinese County, 1929-1937" (2002) and "Fishing and Fishers in Penghu, Taiwan, 1895-1970" (2002). Her research has been supported by fellowships from the National Science Foundation, Fulbright, and the Social Science Research Council.


David K. Schneider
Prof. Schneider is an Associate Professor in the Asian Languages & Literatures program, Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures. He received his Ph.D. in Chinese Language and Literature from the University of California, Berkeley in 2005 and his Masters of International Affairs from the Columbia University School of International Affairs in 1987. His research primarily focuses on Late Medieval Chinese poetry and prose. He can be reached in Herter 442, 413-545-4954, and at dkschneider@asianlan.umass.edu.


Two Catfish

Amanda C. Seaman
Amanda C. Seaman is a Professor of Japanese in the East Asian Languages and Cultures Program within the Languages, Literatures, and Cultures department. She received her Ph.D. in Japanese Literature from the University of Chicago, 2001. Her areas of research are Contemporary Japanese Literature and Culture, Japanese Women Writers and Gender and Popular Culture. She teaches courses in Pre-modern and Modern Japanese Literature, and topics in modern Japanese culture. She can be reached at Herter 515, 413-545-6679, and acseaman@asianlan.umass.edu.


Malcolm Sen
Prof. Sen’s research interests include Irish Studies, South Asian literatures and cultures, postcolonial studies and the environmental humanities. In his current work, he is especially interested in the conceptual pathways through which literary and cultural analysis can play a more dominant role in environmental debates, the role of narrative in our understanding of, and responses to, unraveling climate change effects, and the necessity of re-imagining sovereignty in the twenty-first century. He is located in E352 South College and can be contacted at msen@english.umass.edu and (413) 545-5810.


Svati Shah
Svati Shah is an Associate Professor in the Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies Department. She received her B.A. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1992, her M.P.H. at Emory University, Rollins School of Public Health in 1997, and her Ph.D. from Columbia University in 2006. Her areas of research include political economy of migration, sex work, development, and urbanization in South Asia and South Asian diaspora.


Regine Spector
Regine Spector is an Assistant Professor in the Political Science department. She received her Ph.D. Ppolitical Science from the University of California, Berkeley and a BA and MA in International Relations and International Policy Studies from Stanford University. She studies political economy, development, and politics in Eurasia and teaches courses in comparative politics, political economy, development, and Eurasian studies. She is located in Thompson 416 and can be reached at 413-545-6175 and rspector@polsci.umass.edu.


Reiko Sono
Reiko Sono is a Senior Lecturer in Japanese. She received her Ph.D. at Princeton University in Japanese Religion. Her areas of research are Japanese religions, the culture of gift giving, and Pre-modern Japanese History. Her teaching responsibilities are Death in Japanese Culture (J391) and Advanced Modern Japanese (J536 & J537). She can be reached at Herter 331, 413-545-4947, and rsono@asianlan.umass.edu.


Priyanka Srivastava
Prof. Srivastava is an Assistant Professor in History. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Cincinnati in 2012. Her research interests include Histories of Class, Labor and Urbanism, Class and Gender, Working Class and Associational Culture, Histories and Politics of Reproduction in Colonial India. She can be contacted at 709 Herter Hall, 413-545-6782, and priyanka@history.umass.edu.


Ocean Vuong
Ocean Vuong is an Assistant Professor in English and a world-reknown poet and essayist in areas such as Asian American/Diasporic Studies and Queer/LGBTQ Literature, among others. He is also the author of Night Sky with Exit Wounds, winner of the Whiting Award, finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and a New York Times Top 10 Book of 2016. His writings have been featured in numerous major publications and was selected by Foreign Policy magazine as a 2016 100 Leading Global Thinker and named by BuzzFeed Books as one of “32 Essential Asian American Writers.” He is located in South College.


Zhijun Wang
Associate Professor in Chinese, Herter Room 337, 413-545-4948, and zhijunw@asianlan.umass.edu


Caroline Yang
Caroline Yang is an Assistant Professor in the Dept. of English. She is currently completing a book manuscript titled Reconstruction's Labor: The Chinese Worker in American Literature after Slavery that examines the Chinese worker as a category of analysis in works by Ambrose Bierce, Mark Twain, Bret Harte, Sui Sin Far, and Charles Chesnutt. Her next project centers on figures and spaces of work in late twentieth century and contemporary Asian American and African American literatures in the context of global racial capitalism and military multiculturalism. In addition to Asian American and African American literary studies, her teaching and research interests include comparative race and ethnic studies, gender and sexuality studies, and transnational media and cultural studies. She can be reached at chyang@english.umass.edu.


Yuki Yoshimura
Senior Lecturer in Japanese, Herter 329, 413-545-4953, yuki@asianlan.umass.edu


Enhua Zhang
Prof. Zhang is an Associate Professor in the East Asian Languages and Cultures program, Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures. Her expertise is in modern Chinese literature, Chinese cinema and popular culture, Ming and Qing literature, and 'critical theory on space and the uncanny.' You can learn more about what that means by emailing her at ezhang@llc.umass.edu.