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Roundtable: Building an Asian American and Asian Diaspora Studies Program

Ji-Yeon Yuh is the founding faculty member of the Asian American Studies Program at Northwestern University, where she teaches Asian American history, Asian diasporas, race and gender, and oral history. Her book, Beyond the Shadow of Camptown: Korean Military Brides in America, was the first substantive work to examine the consequences of U.S. militarism for Korean migration and diaspora.Her current projects include a digital oral history repository focused on Asian diasporas, an oral history project on the Midwest as an Asian American space, a book on Korean diaspora in China, Japan, and the United States, and a study of reunification and Korea peace activism in the Korean diaspora. She has been a consultant for numerous public history, media, and education projects, including Still Presents Pasts, an exhibit on Korean Americans and the Korean War, Crossing East, a radio documentary on Asian Americans, and Pollyanna’s forthcoming high school racial literacy curriculum. She is a longtime advocate for Korea peace and reunification and is a co-founder and former steering committee member of the Alliance of Scholars Concerned about Korea. She currently serves on the boards of Women Cross DMZ and the Korea Policy Institute. She is a co-founder and board president of the Korean Performing Arts Institute of Chicago and a former board president of KAN-WIN, an Asian American women’s anti-gender-violence organization. She is a native of Seoul and Chicago, a fan of pungmul, a taekwondo black belt, a science fiction reader, and the mother of three children.

Fariha Khan is the Co-Director of the Asian American Studies program at the University of Pennsylvania where she also teaches courses on South Asians in the U.S, Asian American Communities, Asian American Food, as well as Muslim Identity in America. She received a Master's degree in Arabic and Islamic Studies from Yale University and a PhD in Folklore and Folklife from the University of Pennsylvania. Her current research focuses on South Asian American Muslims, Pakistani American culture, and the Asian American folklore.  Dr. Khan was appointed in 2015 to the Pennsylvania Governor’s Advisory Commission on Asian Pacific American Affairs and served until 2019.  Actively involved in the Philadelphia community, Dr. Khan is Vice Chair of the Board of the Samuel S. Fels Fund and serves on the Board of the American Folklore Society, the Philadelphia Folklore Project, the Philadelphia Asian American Film Festival, and the James Brister Alumni Society.  

Heidi Kim is Director of the Asian American Center at UNC Chapel Hill and a Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature. Her research ranges through nineteenth and twentieth-century American literature and Asian American studies. Illegal Immigrants/Model Minorities: The Cold War of Chinese American Literature, forthcoming from Temple University Press, sheds new light on the writing of and about Chinese Americans, who were dogged by the stigma of illegal immigration and paranoia about Communist infiltration. Her first monograph Invisible Subjects: Asian Americans in Postwar Literature (Oxford UP, 2016) resituates the work of Ralph Ellison, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, and the Melville Revival critics through recent advances in Asian American studies and historiography. She also researches and speaks extensively on the literature and history of the Japanese American incarceration, including the edited volume Taken from the Paradise Isle (UP Colorado, 2015), which won a Ka Palapala Po’okela Award from the Hawaiian Book Publishers Association.