Dr. Guangtian Ha
Guangtian Ha is an anthropologist working at the intersection of religion studies, sound and media studies and gender studies, with a research focus on Muslim communities in China. His work examines ritual performances among the Jahriyya Sufi in northwest China, focusing on how sounds -- ranging from heterogeneous linguistic phonemes to mediatized chants -- circulate throughout history and across distinct groups of Sufi practitioners. He has conducted extensive fieldwork on China's Hui Muslims in various provinces in China since the mid-2000s, focusing on issues of ethnicity, gender, Islamic reformism and the entanglement of religion with national and transnational political economy. In his talk, Ha discusses how Sufi women in China forge vocal spaces of self-expression in a restrictive and male-dominated environment.
Website: https://www.haverford.edu/users/gha
Dr. Clara Iwasaki
Clara Iwasaki's work straddles modern Chinese literature, Asian/American literature, and transnational Asia more broadly. For our lecture series, Iwasaki will examine a literary exchange between Chinese and American women writers about Marxism and feminism. She adds to our series by decentering the West and foregrounding Asia in the study of international feminism.
Twitter: https://twitter.com/claraiwasaki
Dr. H. Yumi Kim
Yumi Kim is a historian with research and teaching interests in histories of medicine, psychiatry, gender, family, colonialism, and religion in East Asia and Pacific Empires in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her work offers a new feminist methodology for archival work and thus supports our series' vision of innovating various fields--in this case, history of science--through a feminist lens.
Dr. Su Yun Kim
Su Yun Kim specializes in modern Korean literature and culture. Her interests include imperialism and colonialism in East Asia (former Japanese Empire); colonialism and race; gender and sexuality; popular literature (middlebrow and lowbrow literature); Korean literary history and novel; transwar Korean cinema. Her current research explores the production of popular fiction and romance in 20th Century Korea supported by HKU (Seed Fund for Basic Research) and Early Career Scheme of the Research Grants Council (RGC) of Hong Kong, SAR. Meanwhile, she has co-edited a book on the transwar culture of Korea and Taiwan. East Asian Transwar Popular Culture: Literature and Film from Taiwan and Korea (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) explores the shared experience of colonialism and post-colonialism of Korea and Taiwan through analysis of literature and film.
Dr. Rhacel Parreñas
Rhacel Salazar Parreñas is Florence Everline Professor of Sociology and Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Southern California. She is an ethnographer who studies labor, gender, international migration, the family and economic sociology. She is the recipient of the 2019 Jessie Bernard Award from the American Sociological Association.
Twitter: https://twitter.com/rhacel
Website: https://rhacelparrenas.com/
Dr. Gowri Vijayakumar
Gowri Vijayakumar is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, affiliated with the South Asian Studies Program at Brandeis. Her articles and essays on gender, sexuality, transnational politics, pandemics, and the state have appeared or are forthcoming in Gender & Society, Social Problems, Qualitative Sociology, Signs, World Development, Viewpoint, Political Power and Social Theory, and Ethnographic Marginalia.
Twitter: https://twitter.com/GowriV
Website: https://gowrivijayakumar.com/
Dr. Thuy Linh Tu
Thuy Linh Tu is Professor of American Studies in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at NYU, where she also serves as the faculty director of the Prison Education Program.Research Collective (https://wp.nyu.edu/nyu_debt_project/). She is the author of Experiments in Skin: Race and Beauty in the Shadows of Vietnam (Duke UP, 2021) and The Beautiful Generation: Asian Americans and the Cultural Economy of Fashion (Duke UP, 2011). Her current research project, "The Chinese in Indian Land," examines the "insourcing" of textile manufacturing from China to the U.S. south and the shifting meanings of race and region in the twilight of industrialization.