Faculty Bios
Asian Research Center Faculty
This page provides an alphabetical listing of Asian Studies Faculty. You may click ‘more info’ to be redirected to more information regarding their research and classes.
Itty Abraham
School of the Future of Innovation in Society
tty Abraham is a professor in the School for the Future of Innovation in Society (SFIS). Before moving to Tempe, he taught at the National University of Singapore, The University of Texas at Austin, and was a program director at the Social Science Research Council. His research covers subjects ranging from postcolonial technoscience and nuclear power to refugees, borderlands and foreign policy. He has received grants from the National Science Foundation, private foundations, and the Fulbright Commission. For more information about his published work see his academia.edu page.
Karen Adams
Department of English
Karen Adams teaches courses in linguistics on sociolinguistics, pragmatics, and discourse analysis including critical discourse analysis. Her research interests include the linguistic construction of opposition, language planning and language rights, and historical comparative work on Austroasiatic languages, specifically their numeral classification systems. She has published Perspectives on Official English (1990), 3 volumes of Papers from the Annual Meeting of the Southeast Asian Linguistics Societyand Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Lao Studies (2010).
Rimjihm Aggarwal
School of Sustainability
Rimjihm Aggarwal teaches courses on International Development and Sustainability, the Economics of Sustainability, and Sustainable use of Environmental Resources. Her research interests include resource economics; water conflicts; poverty; water resource management; agriculture; bio-economics; climate change impacts; decision-making; economic adaptation and climate change; econometrics; economic development; economics of ecosystem services; ecosystem services; environmental policy; urban development; utilities regulation.
Sharmistha Bagchi-Sen
School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning
Sharmistha Bagchi-Sen completed her doctoral work at the University of Georgia. Her research interests are transdisciplinary in the fields of international business, innovation ecosystems, and urban-regional restructuring. In international business, she has worked on the spatial and temporal dynamics of foreign direct investment, internationalization of pharmaceutical companies, and the importance of collaboration in innovation in the bioeconomy. She was one of the first group of visiting faculty members at the School of Business, Economics and Law at Gothenburg University, Sweden. She is currently a member of the International Academic Advisory Council at the School of Business, Economics and Law.
Natasha Behl
School of Social and Behavioral Sciences
Natasha Behl is associate professor in the School of Social and Behavioral Sciences at Arizona State University (ASU). Dr. Behl completed her Ph.D. in Political Science at University of California, Los Angeles. Dr. Behl explains why the promise of democratic equality remains unrealized, and identifies potential ways to create more egalitarian relations in liberal democracies and the discipline of political science. This intellectual endeavor has demanded that she cross disciplinary boundaries and challenge epistemological and methodological norms in political science to understand the gendered and raced nature of politics as a practice and political science as a discipline. She uses interpretive and feminist methods to examine what are often assumed to be neutral concepts, objective methodologies, and universal institutions, and demonstrate that these very concepts, methodologies, and institutions are gendered and raced such that they determine who enjoys democratic inclusion, who commands academic authority, and who is most vulnerable to violence.
Dr. Behl’s book manuscript, Gendered Citizenship: Understanding Gendered Violence in Democratic India, is published with Oxford University Press. She was awarded the Outstanding Teaching Award at ASU where she teaches Global Feminisms, Feminist Action Research, Navigating Academia as a Raced and Gendered Space, Comparative Politics, South Asian Politics, and Everyday Forms of Political Resistance. She has also written for The Washington Post.
Nilanjana Bhattacharjya
Barrett Honors College
Nilanjana Bhattacharjya is a Honors Faculty Fellow at Barrett, The Honors College. Her research as an ethnomusicologist focuses on popular music from South Asia and its diasporic communities. Nilanjana received her Bachelor’s from Wellesley College and earned her Masters and PhD in Musicology from Cornell University. She is particularly interested in how South Asian popular music’s circulation through different media defines different communities throughout the world, and in music’s relationships to popular visual media, especially film. She is at work on a book manuscript that explores how British musicians of South Asian descent and their music contributed to changing ideas of British cultural identity during the mid to late 1990s. Her articles and essays have appeared in journals including Asian Music and South Asian History and Cultureas well as in the edited collections Global Bollywood: Travels of Hindi Song and Danceand South Asian Transnationalisms: Cultural Exchange in the Twentieth Century. Most recently, she co-edited with Peter Kvetko the first ever issue of the interdisciplinary journal South Asian Popular Culture devoted entirely to music. She currently co-chairs the South Asia Performing Arts Section of the Society for Ethnomusicology and serves on the Ethnomusicology Committee of the American Institute of Indian Studies.
Stephen Bokenkamp
School of International Letters and Cultures
Stephen Bokenkamp teaches courses on Chinese. His research interests include early medieval literature and religion, particularly Daoism. He has written most extensively on Six Dynasties religious developments and Tang-period poetics.
Lena Booth
Thunderbird School of Global Management
Lena Booth is the senior associate dean of international academic partnerships and associate professor of finance at Thunderbird. She teaches strategic financial analysis, corporate financial management, global financial management, and advanced topics in finance such as global private equity. Born in Malaysia and educated in Singapore and the U.S., she speaks and writes English, Chinese, and Malay and speaks a few Chinese dialects.Booth's primary research focus is on capital raising through initial public offerings and through commercial banks. Her research has appeared in several distinguished peer-reviewed journals and won her the Thunderbird Faculty Research Award. She also has authored various case studies on financial analysis, investment analysis and valuation, risk management, leveraged buyout, and financial management.
Claudia Brown
School of Art
Claudia Brown teaches courses on the art of China and Japan. Her research interests include later Chinese painting and decorative arts, museums and exhibitions. She has lectured in China, India, Korea and Taiwan. She served as co-curator for the recent exhibition A Tradition Redefined: Modern and Contemporary Chinese Ink Paintings from the Chu-tsing Li Collection, 1950-2000, and was a major contributor to its catalog published by Harvard University Art Museums (2007). Her publications include Buddhist Manuscript Cultures: Knowledge, Ritual and Art (co-authored; 2009).
Megha Budruk
Community Resources/Development
Megha Budruk’s academic interests include human relationships with natural settings, specifically-place attachment and sense of place, crowding and indicator-based social carrying capacity, beneficial outcomes of natural resource recreation, visitor impacts, experience and management at natural and cultural resource settings such as parks, protected areas, and cultural monuments. She is currently involved in a couple of research projects in India. Budruk teaches classes regarding sustainable communities, leisure and quality of life, wilderness and parks in America, as well as theoretical perspectives in community development.
Craig Calhoun
School of Politics and Global Studies
Craig Calhoun is University Professor of Social Sciences. He holds joint appointments in the School of Politics and Global Studies, the School of Public Affairs, the School for the Future of Innovation in Society, the School of Sustainability, and the School of Arts, Media and Engineering. Prior to coming to Arizona State University, Calhoun served as director and president of the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). He was previously president of the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), dean of the Graduate School and director of the University Center for International Studies at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC), and founder and director of the Institute for Public Knowledge at New York University (NYU). In addition to UNC and NYU, he has been a professor at Columbia University and the University of Oslo and a visiting professor at several international universities.
Monica Chadha
Journalism and Mass Communication
Monica Chadha is an associate professor at the Cronkite School, where she teaches multimedia journalism to advanced-level students and conducts innovative research on digital media and entrepreneurial journalism. At the BBC, Chadha served as a news correspondent and a research consultant in India. There, she wrote and produced news stories on a variety of subjects, including the Indian economy, politics and entertainment. She also worked with journalists across South Asia, assigning and editing news stories. At The Indian Express, she wrote feature stories on business, education, food and health for the daily newspaper in Mumbai.
Deepak Chhabra
Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability
Deepak Chhabra provides a multidisciplinary perspective on contemporary issues associated with sustainable use of leisure and tourism resources. She has identified crucial factors that promote socio/cultural and economic equity and capital of both the visiting and visited communities. She has also applied different theories of authenticity to amass cultural capital and advance the sustainable use of heritage as manifested in traditional handicrafts, historic sites, and museums. This has entailed an in-depth exploration of the significance of authenticity and marketing in heritage tourism and critical examinations of the commoditization of authenticity as a marketing tool to draw visitors and revenue for the associated heritage institutions. She has further examined challenges associated with the ethical consumption of heritage by analyzing the effects of the tourist gaze on marginalized communities in the United States and the developing world. Additionally, her work has examined the notion of economic equity by determining visitor expenditures and sustained economic benefits of cultural/heritage tourism and gambling tourism for destination communities, as well as for local and state governments. This includes calculating multiplier effects and assessment of net economic benefits by factoring in socio-economic costs. Her prominent research work includes chairing a study for Wickenburg Chamber of Commerce to ascertain economic impact of visitors to Wickenburg and determine their marketing. She recently conducted a study to determine economic impact of visitors to regional parks for the Maricopa County Parks and Recreation Department. She has also chaired a study sponsored by the Iowa Legislative Council for a socioeconomic impact study of casino gambling on Iowans. This study received local, national and international attention..
Huaiyu Chen
School of Historical, Philosophical, and Religious Studies
Huaiyu Chen teaches courses on Buddhism and Chinese religions and religions of the Silk Road. His research interests span Buddhism, Nestorian Christianity, medieval Chinese social and cultural history, as well as modern intellectual history.
Pauline Cheong
Hugh Downs School of Communication
Pauline Hope Cheong teaches courses on intercultural communication, new media, computer-mediated communication, viral culture and globalization. Her research focuses on the socio-cultural implications of communication technologies, particularly on the distribution of wealth and opportunity in society. This includes thinking about the mediation of authority and influence, civic participation and community building, with a multidisciplinary, international and multi-media perspective. Her award-winning research has been published in more than 50 papers in journals and books. She is the lead editor of two volumes, a) New Media and Intercultural Communication: Identity, Community and Politics, and b) Digital Religion, Social Media and Culture: Perspectives, Practices and Futures.
Nalini Chhetri
School for the Future of Innovation in Society
Nalini Chhetri is the assistant director, and clinical associate professor in the School for the Future of Innovation in Society and with the School of Sustainability. She holds a doctorate in education policy studies with a minor in demography from Pennsylvania State University, and an M.Sc in Cyto-genetics.
Professor Chhetri’s work centers on climate impacts and communication, technological impacts in developing nations, knowledge systems, gender, and urban sustainability. Her career also included directing sustainable development programs for international nongovernmental organizations for over a decade. She works with think-tanks and agencies in China, Ghana, India, Jordan, Nepal, Thailand, Vietnam, and Thailand. She has consulted for United Nations and European bilateral agencies..
Netra Chhetri
School for the Future of Innovation in Society
Netra B. Chhetri has been in the forefront of advancing innovative approaches to climate adaptation that tie together and link multi-scalar processes between environmental dynamics and social outcomes. Working at the complex intersections of climate change adaptation, food security, resource governance, grassroots innovation, and public engagement Professor Chhetri's skill set allows him to span the boundary of knowledge and practice, so that each reinforces the other.
As a scholar, Professor Chhetri's efforts to develop a method for assessing the multiple sources of environmental impacts on society is unique and an important tool for designing and prioritizing climate adaptation strategies. As a practitioner, he has more than a decade of experience working at the complex intersection of science and policy and developing most promising solutions that focus on scalability, impact, and sustainability.
Professor Chhetri's expertise in global food security has evolved to focus on the impacts of climate change on global food systems, leading him to be one of the contributing authors to the Fourth (2007) and Fifth (2014) Assessment Reports of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). His work appears in numerous prestigious and peer-reviewed publications including Nature and the Journal of the National Academy of the Sciences. He is also a part of a team exploring how biofuel crops such as perennial grasses can be grown sustainably in the United States.
Sookja Cho
School of International Letters and Cultures
Sookja Cho graduated from Washington University in St. Louis with a Ph.D. in Chinese and Comparative Literature (Korean). Her research covers a variety of issues related to pre-modern Korean and Chinese literature and culture, including how the early reception of Chinese vernacular or religious stories played a role in the development of pre-modern Korean fiction; how the historical presence of Korean women was acknowledged by Korean men; and how Korean female writers’ works were introduced and circulated in China and Japan, during the Choson dynasty (1392-1910). She is currently working on her book project on “Butterfly Lovers in China and Korea,” which investigates the process of how a Chinese tale becomes appropriated and localized by Korean people.
Adam Chodorow
Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law
Adam Chodorow’s research and teaching interests lie in tax, administrative and regulatory law. He teaches a variety of tax courses, as well as business organizations. His research focuses on religious taxation and a variety of contemporary tax issues, such as the taxability of virtual income.
Julie F. Codell
Art History and Film and Media Studies
Professor Julie Codell’s teaching interests include the era of the British Raj in India, South Asian film, and gender, race, and world cinema. She has written on Gandhi’s Autobiography, colonial photography, orientalism, art collections and museums in Baroda, empire films, Indians and the 19th-century press, Indian travel writing and Indian crafts. She edited Transculturation in British Art (2012), Power and Resistance: The Delhi Coronation Durbars (2012), Genre, Gender, Race and World Cinema (2007), Imperial Co-Histories (2003) and Orientalism Transposed (1998) currently being translated into Japanese (Hosei University, 2014). She guest edited an issue of Victorian Periodicals Review on the 19th-century press in India (2004). She is affiliated with English, Film and Media Studies, Gender and Women’s Studies, and the Center for the Study of Religion and Conflict as well as the Center for Asian Research.
Manjira Datta
W.P. Carey School of Business
Manjira Datta teaches courses on South Asia and the world economy, international trade theory, and the global business environment. Her research interests include Economic theory, international trade, macroeconomics, and resource economics.
Uttaran Dutta
High Downs School of Human Communication
Uttaran Dutta is assistant professor of intercultural communication with the Hugh Downs School of Human Communication. Interdisciplinary exposure, competence and field research experiences help define his several research interests; they are, participatory sustainable social change communication research, subaltern development and health communication research, interaction design research for the underserved, and visual communication research in developing countries. Study of subalterns with a critical-cultural communicative lens is the central focus of his scholarship. His current research on one hand seeks to examine how the underserved people enunciate their situated socio-political, economic realities, and articulate the contextual development issues; and on the other hand, it seeks to study how they collectively identify and utilize locally available resources and opportunities to achieve their development goals and to overcome the adversities of everyday existence.
Sophal Ear
Thunderbird School of Global Management
Sophal Ear is the Senior Associate Dean of Student Success and a tenured associate professor in the Thunderbird School of Global Management at Arizona State University where he lectures on global political economy, International Organizations, and regional management in Asia. He previously taught at Occidental College, the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School, and the Maxwell School of Syracuse University. He consulted for the World Bank, was Assistant Resident Representative for the United Nations Development Programme in East Timor, Term Member of the Council on Foreign Relations, Advisor to Cambodia's first private equity fund Leopard Capital, Audit Chair of the Nathan Cummings Foundation, and Treasurer of the Southeast Asia Resource Action Center.
Ding Fei
School of Sustainability
Ding Fei is an interdisciplinary social scientist whose work lies at the intersection of critical development studies, economic geography, labor studies, and China studies. Her research aims to elucidate the structures, processes, agencies, and relationalities that shape China’s globalization, and the implications for sustainable development in countries of the “Global South.” She has done projects to assess Chinese engagement in Africa’s telecommunications, construction, manufacturing, and health sectors, focusing on issues of inter-firm competition, business localization, capital-labor relations, and skills transfer. Fei had a Ph.D. and an M.A. in Geography from the University of Minnesota - Twin Cities, and a B.S. in Resource Science from Beijing Normal University.
David Fossum
School of Music
Dave Fossum is an Assistant Professor in the School of Music. Combining extensive ethnographic fieldwork and archival research, he studies ideas about creativity and intellectual property, focusing particularly on music in Turkey and Central Asia. He has received fellowships and grants from Brown University, the University of Pittsburgh, the American Research Institute in Turkey, and the Reed Foundation. He has published articles on traditional music in Turkmenistan and has presented papers at numerous conferences including The Society for Ethnomusicology, Analytical Approaches to World Music, and the East Coast Semiotic Anthropology Conference, among others. He is currently writing a monograph titled “A Cult of Anonymity in the Age of Copyright: Creativity and Policy in Turkey’s Music Industry.” The book examines how concepts of musical creativity inform and are shaped by Turkey's cultural policy, particularly in state broadcasting and in the realm of intellectual property law and administration.
Ralph Gabbard
ASU Libraries, Collections and Scholarly Communications Office
Ralph Gabbard is a senior research librarian with responsibilities for South Asia, Southeast Asia and Japan as well as selector for the aforementioned areas as well as Asian Religions and Asian Art. He is the library’s Coordinator of International Projects and fromally Co-Principal Investigator, Myanmar Librarian Training Program. He is the program manager for the Agnes Smedley Exhbitions porject in China. He is Affiliated Faculty, Center for Asian Research and Affiliated Faculty, The Herberger Institute of Design and the Arts’ School of Art. Presently he is teaching courses in Modern and Contemporary Chinese Art, Contemporary Art of Asia, and Contemporary Art of Southeast Asia. His research areas for the role of artists’ collectives in East and Southeast Asia, and role of art collectors and curators impact on the art market.
Doug Guthrie
Thunderbird School of Global Management
Doug Guthrie is the executive director of Thunderbird Global and a professor. He has spent his career researching, writing, teaching and advising companies about two topics: organizational development, where he has focused on issues of leadership, organizational culture and corporate social responsibility; and the Chinese economic reforms, where he has focused on the intersection of economic and political forces that lead to successful economic development models. Currently, he is Professor of Global Leadership at the Thunderbird School of Global Management, where his is also Director of China Initiatives and Executive Director of Thunderbird Global. From 2014-19, Guthrie was a Senior Director at Apple, based in Shanghai China, where he led Apple University efforts on leadership and organizational development in China. Prior to joining Apple, from 2010-14, Guthrie was Dean of the George Washington School of Business, Vice President for University China Operations, and Professor of Management and International Business. He is the Co-Founder of On Global Leadership
Chad Haines
Center for the Study of Religion & Conflict
Chad Haines has research interests in Social Anthropology, Pakistan, Islam, South Asia, globalization, urban transformation, postcoloniality, Dubai, Cairo. His research focuses on everyday lives of Muslims and how they create new identities through such social practices as lifestyle options, consumption, labor, and migration. He is the author of Nation, Territory and Globalization in Pakistan: A View from the Margins (Routledge, 2012) and is currently working on a new manuscript tentatively titled Being Global, Being Muslim: Dubai, Islamabad, and Cairo.
Lauren Harris
School of Historical, Philosophical & Religious Studies
Lauren McArthur Harris is an associate professor of history education with a joint appointment in the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College and the School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies. Her work focuses on representations of history in curricular resources and investigates how teachers teach history in schools. Professor Harris is a former ninth grade world history teacher in Arlington, VA. She has published in journals such as Cognition and Instruction, Theory and Research in Social Education, and the Journal of Curriculum Studies. Harris is an associate editor for the journal Education Policy Analysis Archives and serves on the editorial board of Theory and Research in Social Education. She is co-editor with Scott Metzger of the Wiley International Handbook of History Teaching and Learning (2018).
William Hedberg
School of International Letters and Cultures
William C. Hedberg's primary research focus is the literature and culture of early modern Japan. His first book, The Japanese Discovery of Chinese Fiction: The Water Margin and the Making of a National Canon, was published by Columbia University Press in the fall of 2019. Other research interests include Japanese Sinology, translation studies, and travel literature in early modern and modern East Asia. Hedberg's research has been published in the Journal of Japanese Studies, Japan Forum, East Asian Publishing and Society, and Sino-Japanese Studies, among other venues..
Alexander Henn
School of Historical, Philosophical, and Religious Studies
Alexander Henn teaches courses in the religions of India, Goa, Colonialism and Post-Colonialism, Ritual, Religion and Globalization. He has further research interests in regional specialization Goa and India, thematic interests cultural and religious encounters, cultural and religious theory, colonialism and post-colonialism, rituals, semiotics, history of anthropology.
Kumiko Hirano Gahan
School of International Letters and Cultures
Kumiko Hirano Gahan is a lecturer at the School of International Letters and Cultures. She teaches Japanese Oral Communication and intensive Japanese classes.
Daniel Hruschka
School of Human Evolution and Social Change
Daniel Hruschka explores the intersection between culture and health, as well as culture and social behavior. He conducts regular fieldwork in Bangladesh. At ASU, he teaches Introduction to Medical Anthropology, Introduction to Global Health, and Health: Social and Biocultural Theories. Hruschka is the author of Friendship: Development, Ecology, and Evolution of a Relationship (2010).
Faheem Hussain
School for the Future of Innovation in Society
Dr. Faheem Hussain has over 15 years of experience conducting Socio-Economic Development and Technological Interventions related research in Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, and North America. He is currently working as a Clinical Associate Professor in the School for the Future of Innovation in Society (SFIS) at Arizona State University (ASU), USA. Before joining ASU, he worked as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Technology and Society, College of Engineering and Applied Sciences at State University of New York (SUNY), Korea. Faheem Hussain also worked as a founding faculty in Asian University for Women in Bangladesh and taught at Carnegie Mellon University’s Qatar Campus.
Hjorleifur Jonsson
School of Human Evolution and Social Change
Hjorleifur Jonsson’s research interests include Culture, Heritage and Identity; Global Dynamics and Regional Interactions, Ethnicity, Ethnohistory, Globalization, Identity and Differentiation, Land Use, Political Organization, Social Organization, Sports, Sociocultural Anthropology in Asia and the U.S. He has focused his research on hinterland farming populations in mainland Southeast Asia. His work has concerned the dynamics of identity, cultural practice and social life at the intersections of minority communities and state structures among the Mien people in Thailand and among Iu Mien in the US who are refugee immigrants from Laos. He has also conducted research in Cambodia and Vietnam within the last decade.
Hue-Tam Jamme
School of geological Science & Urban Planning
Huê-Tâm Jamme studies urbanisms in transition from a comparative perspective. Using a range of qualitative and quantitative methods, she focuses on the lived experience of societal transformations. Her research explores in particular whether the development of information and communication networks shapes inclusive urban spaces. Jamme currently leads a research project centered on the gig economy and women’s upward mobility and in the capitals of Cambodia, Myanmar, and Thailand. In previous research, she investigated the socio-spatial consequences of the transition towards auto-mobility in Vietnam. Her research interests further include public space, street vending, affordable housing and transit-oriented development (TOD), and active travel, both in cities of the Global South and in the United States.
Agnes Kefeli Clay
School of Historical, Philosophical, and Religious Studies
Agnes Kefeli-Clay teaches courses on the three Abrahamic faiths (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam), Islam in Central Asia, Islamic civilization, Islam in the modern world, and world religions. Her research engages the encounter between Eurasian Islamic cultures and the Russian empire and explores the intersections between conversion, religious knowledge, collective memory, state power, and gender construction. Her book manuscript,Becoming Muslim in Imperial Russia: Conversion, Apostasy, and Literacy, 1865-1917 (currently under review), examines the long history of conflict and cohabitation between the predominantly Muslim Tatars and Russians. She has won several prestigious grants and fellowships from the International Research and Exchanges Board, the American Association of University Women, the Spencer Foundation, and the John W. Kluge Center of the Library of Congress.
Heewon Kim
Hugh Downs School of Human Communication
Heewon Kim has devoted herself to examining organizational, social, and health implications of technology use in a variety of settings including global high-tech organizations, technology-consulting firms, healthcare organziations, and start-ups. Her primary research investigates how disparate patterns of technology use both reflect and refract existing organizational dynamics and structures, with a particular focus on knowledge sharing. Her second line of research deals with technology-enabled health intervention and its impact on health and behavior change. Her current focus includes the development of culturally-adapted mHealth intervention programs for obese populations. She employs a mixed-method approach drawing on qualitative, quantitative, and social network data..
Lucas Klein
School of International Letters and Cultures
Lucas Klein (PhD Yale) is a father, writer, and translator. His scholarship and criticism have appeared in the monograph The Organization of Distance: Poetry, Translation, Chineseness (Brill, 2018), as well as in Comparative Literature Studies, LARB, Jacket, CLEAR, PMLA, and other venues. His translation Notes on the Mosquito: Selected Poems of Xi Chuan (New Directions, 2012) won the 2013 Lucien Stryk Prize; other publications include his translations of the poetry of Mang Ke, October Dedications (Zephyr and Chinese University Press, 2018), and contributions to Li Shangyin (New York Review Books, 2018). His translations of the poetry of Duo Duo, forthcoming from Yale University Press, won a PEN/Heim Translation Fund grant, and he co-edited Chinese Poetry and Translation: Rights and Wrongs (2019) with Maghiel van Crevel, downloadable for free from Amsterdam University Press.
Judit Kroo
School of International Letters and Cultures
Judit Kroo's research analyzes linguistic and embodied practices as sites of micropolitics that are implicated in the construction of new socio-political spatialities, including digital spatialities. Her current research project investigates the lifeways of younger Japanese and Korean adults who engage in alternative forms of environmentally informed economic participation linked to notions of artisanship or craft in urban centers. Attending closely to these younger artisans’ stylistic practice, this project probes the possibilities and limitations of ‘apolitical politics’ as a model for socioeconomic resistance and ecological action. She has also published and is currently working on projects in media and gender studies that contribute to ongoing debates concerning the relationship between social media, popular culture, spatiality, and linguistic style.
Kyounghee Kwon
School of Journalism and Mass Communication
Kyounghee "Hazel" Kwon received a doctoral degree in Communication from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 2011, and has served on the faculty at Drexel University in Philadelphia, PA before joining the Arizona State University.
Her research interests focus on social and mobile technologies, with a particular emphasis on the dynamics in which technology-mediated communication influences collective responses during social crisis and disasters public opinions, network-based social influence, and civic/political participation. Some of her research have been supported by NSF and HASTAC. Dr. Kwon has received Herbert S. Dordick Dissertation Award from the International Communication Association (ICA), Kappa Tao Alpha Research Award from National Honor Society in Journalism and Mass Communication, Jung-Sook Lee Award from the Association for Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC), and Top Four Paper Award from National Communication Association (NCA). Her publications have appeared in multiple journals including Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, CyberPsychology, Behavior & Social Networking, Computers in Human Behaviors, Asian Journal of Communication, and Journal of Information Technology & Politics.
Zhiyong Lan
The School of Public Affairs
Zhiyong Lan teaches courses on public service and organizational behavior.
Sangmi Lee
School of Social and Behavioral Sciences
Sangmi Lee received her D.Phil. in anthropology in 2016 from the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology (ISCA) at the University of Oxford, U.K. Prior to coming to School of Social and Behavioral Sciences as an assistant professor in Spring 2018, she was a lecturer at Seoul National University, South Korea. Her current research focuses on how Hmong living in the diaspora have maintained extensive kinship networks and various cultural and economic practices across national borders despite the uncertainty about the location of ancestral homeland while also experiencing ethnic cultural differences based on their "partial" affiliation with different nation-states of residence. For this project, she conducted comparative, long-term ethnographic fieldwork with the Hmong communities in central Laos and the United States (California).
Jianling Liao
School of International Letters and Cultures
Jianling Liao is assistant professor of Chinese and director of the Chinese Flagship Program at Arizona State University. Her research focuses on the interlanguage development in the dimensions of L2 writing and speaking abilities. She is also interested in the development of L2 speaking/writing abilities on the basis of reading/listening input and practice. Her other interests include Computer-Assisted Language Learning (CALL) and proficiency gains in study abroad learning settings. She teaches courses in the areas of language teaching methodologies, language assessment, curriculum design, and Chinese language at all levels.
Han Hsien Liew
SHPRS Religious Studies
Han Hsien Liew is an intellectual historian of the premodern Islamic world and is currently Assistant Professor of Classical Islamic Studies in the School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies at Arizona State University. His research interests include medieval Islamic political thought; premodern Islamic scholarly culture and transmission of knowledge; Qur’anic exegesis (tafsir); and Arabic-Islamic historical and biographical writings.
Karen Kuo
School of Social Transformation
Karen Kuo is an associate professor in the School of Social Transformation. Her current work focuses on the geopolitical and cultural representations of Asia and Asians in films and novels of early twentieth century America. Her work examines how U.S. narratives about Asia and Asian migration culturally defined US understandings of the foreign and the domestic. She was also the lead principal investigator for the International Nikkei Legacy Project (INRP) sponsored in part by the Japanese American National Museum. The INRP creates and maintains a database of international Nikkei sources in Arizona and interfaces with the global Japanese diaspora project of the museum.
Kuo's teaching and research interests include Asian American film and literature, film studies, 20th-century American literature, film theory, immigrant literature, postcolonial theory and cultural studies. Kuo has taught a variety of courses that include modern twentieth-century literature, and Asian American literature, film and media, and history. She delivers speeches and talks on the role of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in US history and culture to private and public organizations and groups within Arizona. In addition she is co-editing "Japanese Americans in Arizona." Her future work will explore the formation of Taiwanese American communities and identity during the Cold War.
Wei Li
School of Social Transformation
Wei Li received her geography B.S. and M.S. degrees in Beijing, China; and her Ph.D. in geography at the University of Southern California. She is Professor at the Asian Pacific American Studies / School of Social Transformation, and School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning in the Arizona State University, USA. Her foci of research are immigration and integration, and transnational connections, focusing on the Pacific Rim. She is the author or [co-]editor of four scholarly books: Immigrant Geographies in North American Cities, Carlos Teixeira, Wei Li, and Audrey Kobayashi eds., Oxford University Press; Ethnoburb: the New Ethnic Community in Urban America, Wei Li, University of Hawaii Press, 2009, the 2009 Book Award in Social Sciences, Association for Asian American Studies; From Urban Enclave to Ethnic Suburb: new Asian communities in Pacific Rim countries, Wei Li ed., University of Hawaii Press, 2006; and Landscapes of the Ethnic Economy, David Kaplan and Wei Li eds., Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. 2006), two journal theme issues, and has about 80 other academic publications. She was the Chair of the U.S. Census Bureau’s Race and Ethnic Advisory Committees (REAC) on the Asian Population (2010-2012), and the Fulbright Research Chair in Queen’s University, Canada (2006-2007); and currently a member of the International Steering Committee for the International Metropolis Project; and the North American Director for the International Society of Studying Chinese Overseas. She also served as one of the inaugural class of the National Asia Research Associates with the National Bureau of Asian Research and Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.
Xiaoqiao Ling
School of International Letters and Cultures
Xiaoqiao Ling received her M.A. from University of Washington and Ph.D. from Harvard University. Her main field of interest is late imperial Chinese literature with a focus on performance texts and vernacular fiction. She is currently working on studies of textual representations of performance space, literary imagination of law and justice, and reconfigurations of knowledge structure in fiction especially in light of the seventeenth-century printing boom.
Qian Liu
ASU Libraries, Collections and Scholarly Communications Office
Qian Liu is a subject librarian whose specialties include the Asian, Chinese and Japanese Studies LibGuides. Her specialty is Chinese studies. However, she is happy to assist with the other two subjects.
Edward Mallot
Department of English
Edward Mallot teaches courses in. His research interests include postwar British literature, postcolonial studies, gender and sexuality studies, and contemporary global/Anglophone literature with specific projects in-progress focusing on contemporary South Asian literatures in English.
Sarup Mathur
Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College
Sarup Mathur teaches courses on effective classroom management, behavioral analysis, as well as behavioral and emotional problems in children. She has published Education and Treatment of Children (2005), Education and Treatment of Children (2007), and Severe Behavior Disorders of Children and Youth (2008).
Paul Kei Matsuda
Department of English
Paul Kei Matsuda is Professor of English and Director of Second Language Writing. His research interests span across a wide variety of disciplinary contexts, including applied linguistics, rhetoric and composition, and Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL). He is founding chair of the Symposium on Second Language Writing and editor of Parlor Press Series on Second Language Writing. He is also President-Elect of the American Association for Applied Linguistics. He has held visiting professor positions at Chulalongkorn University, Thailand; Nagoya University, Japan; Shih Chien University, Taiwan; Tamkang University, Taiwan; Thammasat University, Thailand; and the University of Hong Kong, China. He has also given numerous lectures on a wide range of topics related to language, writing and teaching at various conferences and institutions throughout Asia.
Sara Meerow
School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning
Sara Meerow is an interdisciplinary social-ecological systems scientist working at the intersection of urban geography and planning. Her research tackles the challenge of how to make cities more resilient in the face of climate change and other social and environmental hazards. She combines more conceptual studies of urban resilience with empirical research on the complexities of green infrastructure and climate change adaptation planning in a range of cities including Manila, New York, Los Angeles, and Detroit. Meerow emphasizes problem-driven, collaborative research that combines qualitative and quantitative methods with spatial analysis. She earned her doctorate in 2017 from the School of Natural Resources and Environment (now the School for Environment and Sustainability) at the University of Michigan. She also has a master's in international development studies from the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands.
Soe Myint
School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning
Soe Myint teaches courses on Air Photo Interpretation, Digital Analysis of Remotely Sensed Data, Advanced Digital Analysis of, Remotely Sensed Data and Remote Sensing. His research interests include Remote Sensing, GIS, geospatial statistics, land use land cover change, architecture, and prediction; assessment and monitoring of drought, land degradation, and desertification; urban environmental modeling; forest characterization including coastal environments; disaster assessment, geospatial techniques and algorithm development.
Yukari Nakamura-Deacon
School of International Letters and Cultures
Yukari Nakamura-Deacon has a MA in Japanese Linguistics and Pedagogy from University of Wisconsin-Madison and a MA in Education from Carthage College. As an instructor at ASU, she teaches beginning, intermediate, and advanced Japanese language courses and has taught calligraphy. Her research interests include student acquisition of pragmatic Japanese sentence final expressions and the effectiveness/implementation of student-led classroom activities. She is interested in implementing curriculum development to facilitate students’ language learning such as utilization of Japanese comic books. Prior to ASU, she taught at the University of Florida as a senior lecturer for 9 years and served as a board member of the Association of Florida Teachers of Japanese for 3 years.
Young Oh
School of International Letters and Cultures
Young Kyun Oh graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a Ph.D. in Chinese linguistics. He has published several articles on Sino-Korean linguistics and cultural connections. He has developed interests in books and print culture of East Asia, and recently finished a book manuscript, Engraving Virtue: the Print History of a Premodern Moral Primer (forthcoming, Brill).
Pori Park
School of Historical, Philosophical, and Religious Studies
Pori Park teaches courses on Korean Buddhism; Religious Traditions of Korea; Folk Religions of Korea; Korean Language; Buddhism; East Asian Buddhism; Zen Buddhism; Religion, Nationalism, and Ethnic Conflict; Buddhism, Gender, and Modernity; and Ritual, Symbol, and Myth. Her research includes has focused on the intersection between Buddhism, colonialism, modernity, nationalism, and globalization. Examining the transformation of Buddhism in modernity, Buddhism and politics, and Buddhism’s involvement in social life, her scholarship provides a broad understanding of modern Korea as well as of the interplay between religion and politics. Her publications include Trial and Error in Modernist Reforms: Korean Buddhism under Colonial Rule (2009) and she is working on her second book, titled Korean Buddhism Post-Liberation: De-colonization, Politics, and Modernization.
Indulata Prasad
SST Women and Gender Studies
Indulata Prasad is an assistant professor of women and gender studies in the School of Social Transformation. Her research and scholarship include South Asia, Social Movements, Dalit Studies, Oral History, Social Mapping, Gender, Caste, and Land Rights. In her current project, she uses social mapping alongside ethnography to examine how legal rights to redistributed land has impacted Dalit (former untouchables) lives.
Daniel Rothenberg
School of Political and Global Studies and Co-Director, Center on the Future of War, ASU
Daniel Rothenberg is Professor of Practice in the School of Politics and Global Studies and Co-Director, Center on the Future of War, ASU. Previously, he was the founding executive director of the Center for Law and Global Affairs at the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law. His research focuses on human rights documentation and analysis and transitional justice with a focus on genocide, truth commissions and post-conflict reconstruction. Rothenberg has designed and managed rule of law projects in Afghanistan, Iraq, central Africa, Southeast Asia and throughout Latin America including programs to train human rights NGOs, aid indigenous peoples in using international legal remedies, support gender justice and collect and analyze first-person narratives from victims of severe human rights violations. Before joining the faculty at ASU, Rothenberg was Managing Director of International Projects at the International Human Rights Law Institute at DePaul University College of Law, Senior Fellow at the Orville H. Schell, Jr. Center for International Human Rights at Yale Law School, Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Michigan, and a Fellow in the Michigan Society of Fellows. He is the author of various articles and monographs as well as With These Hands: The Hidden World of Migrant Farmworkers Today (University of California) Memory of Silence: The Guatemalan Truth Commission Report (Palgrave) as well as the forthcoming co-edited volume, Drones and the Promise of Law (Cambridge University Press).
Yasmin Saikia
School of Historical, Philosophical, and Religious Studies
Yasmin Saikia’s research interests include South Asia, history and memory, violence and gender, Muslim history, children and identity. She has published In the Meadows of Gold: Telling Tales of the Swargadeos at the Crossroads of Assam (1997), Fragmented Memories: Struggling to Become Tai-Ahom in India (2004) and Women, War, and the Making of Bangladesh: Remembering 1971 (2011). Currently, she is working on two book projects: one is on Muslim history and decolonization in British India, and the other is on writing a children’s history on learning peace and violence in India, Pakistan, and Palestine.
An Nguyen Sakach
School of International Letters and Cultures
An Sakach received her M.A. in Applied Linguistics from Ohio University and B.A. in Linguistics from Hanoi National University, Vietnam. She has had experience in teaching Vietnamese Language & Literature as well as Learning Support at K12 international schools and English and Vietnamese languages at college level. In addition to teaching the Vietnamese language at ASU, she is also working in the field of language development in bilingual children, material development for heritage Vietnamese learners, and second language speech. An is also interested in Southeast Asian languages and translation.
Juliane Schober
School of Historical, Philosophical, and Religious Studies
Juliane Schober teaches courses on the religions of Southeast Asia, Buddhism, Modern Buddhism, Theravada Buddhism in South and Southeast Asia, Religion and Postcolonial Theory, as well as Religion, Conflict and Civil Society. Her research interests include anthropology of religion; postcolonial studies; material culture, icons and ritual; sacred biography; pilgrimage and sacred space; religions in Southeast Asia, especially the culture and history of Buddhist traditions in Burma, and the comparative study of Theravada Buddhism. Her publications include Buddhist Manuscript Cultures: Knowledge, Ritual and Art, S. Berkwitz and C. Brown, co-editors (2008) and Modern Buddhist Conjunctures in Myanmar: Cultural Narratives, Colonial Legacies, and Civil Society (2010).
Tomoko Shimomura
School of International Letters and Cultures
Tomoko Shimomura is a senior lecturer at School of International Letters and Culture. She teaches Japanese composition along with first, second and third year Japanese.
YoungJu Shin
The Hugh Downs School of Human Communication
YoungJu Shin's primary line of research focuses on how parents, as anti-substance-use socialization agents influence youth health outcomes. She has conducted a series of studies that examined differential roles of family, media, and culture for youth substance use prevention. She is also interested in immigrant families and health during the acculturation process, specifically investigating the effects of role reversal between parent and child in Mexican immigrant families as well as differential characteristics of acculturation typologies of Mexican immigrants. .
Theodore Solis
School of Music
Theodore Solis teaches courses on ethnomusicology and music as culture. His research interests include the Hispanic Caribbean, dance, Hindustani Music, Diasporic music, Javanese gamelan, and pedagogical issues. He co-edited Performing Ethnomusicology: Teaching and Representation in World Musics (2004).
Cindi SturtzSreetharan
School of Human Evolution and Social Change
Cindi SturtzSreetharan earned a bachelor's in international relations from Willamette University; an master's in Asian studies from the University of Oregon; and a doctorate in Anthropology from University of California at Davis. To date, her interests have centered on a language-in-interaction approach to the construction of masculinity; specifically, most of her work has focused on how Japanese men use language as a resource for creating, maintaining, or refuting a masculine identity. More recently she has turned her attention to the intersection of language, the body, and medicine.
Peter Suwarno
School of International Letters and Cultures
Peter Suwarno teaches courses on Indonesian and linguistics.
Joanne Tsao
School of International Letters and Cultures
Joanne Tsao's primary research focus is on early medieval and medieval Chinese literature and culture. Her book, The City of Ye in the Chinese Literary Landscape (Brill, 2020), examines teh changing literary representation and interpretation of the physical and imaginary spaces of Ye, a short lived city first planned by Cao Cao (155–220). Her research has also been published in Journal of Early Medieval China and Guangxi Normal University Journal of Society for Chinese Studies Librarians.
Robert Tuck
School of International Letters and Cultures
Robert Tuck studies 19th century Japanese literature and culture, especially Sino-Japanese literary genres and cultural relations. His first book, “Idly Scribbling Rhymers: Poetry, Print, and Community in 19th Century Japan,” was published in July 2018 by Columbia University Press. His next project is a complete translation of and monograph on arguably the most widely-read text of 19th Century Japan, Rai Sanyo’s “Nihon gaishi” (An Unofficial History of Japan, 1827). Tuck is an assistant professor in the School of International Letters and Cultures.
Ebru Türker
School of International Letters and Cultures
Ebru Türker is an assistant professor of Korean language and linguistics at the SILC since 2012, and has previously taught courses on Korean language and linguistics at the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa. She obtained her master’s degree in 1997 in linguistics at Seoul National University in Korea and her doctoral degree in Korean language at the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures of the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa in 2005. Her main research interest involves the study of cognitive/psycholinguistic processes involved in second language acquisition with a particular focus of Korean-as-a-foreign-language. Specific topics include second/third language acquisition (with emphasis on cross-linguistic analysis), longitudinal L2 acquisition, metaphorical language and thought (with emphasis on corpus research), metaphor acquisition in L2 learning.
Linh Vu
College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
Linh D. Vu is an assistant professor of history in the School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies at Arizona State University. She studies legal, social, and cultural history of the war dead in twentieth-century China. Her other projects include war commemoration, terrorism, and unconventional nationalist ideologies at the turn of the twentieth century in East and Southeast Asia. She offers courses on such topics as violence, revolutions, personal narratives, the family, and legal history in modern China. She currently serves in the undergraduate committee for the history unit and the committee for the online MA in WWII studies, and participates in activities at the Center for Asian Research. Her language skills include: Vietnamese (native speaker), Mandarin Chinese, Classical Chinese, Japanese (reading), and French (reading).
Nicholas Williams
School of International Letters and Cultures
Nicholas Morrow Williams is an associate professor of Chinese literature who joins the School of International Languages and Cultures at ASU from the University of Hong Kong. He studies and translates classical Chinese poetry, and is particularly interested in its cross-cultural, linguistic, religious and ideological underpinnings. His complete translation of the ancient anthology “Elegies of Chu” is forthcoming in the “Oxford World's Classics” series..
Bradley Wilson
School of International Letters and Cultures
Bradley Wilson teaches courses on the Japanese language and culture that include calligraphy, Japanese popular culture and Japanese Anime. His research interests in Japanese Pedagogy, Scaffolding in Language Learning, Onmyodo, and Japanese Folklore.
Aggie Yellow Horse
School of Social Transformation
Aggie (Jooyoung) Yellow Horse is an assistant professor of Asian Pacific American studies and justice and social inquiry in the School of Social Transformation. Prior to joining School of Social Transformation at ASU, she completed her doctorate degrees in sociology and demography at the Pennsylvania State University; and also worked as a political cartographer for a non-profit organization in Chicago to promote equal political representation for racial and ethnic minorities in redistricting (see Map of Chicago Chinatown & Redistricting). She received the Community-based Redistricting Fellowship from the Southern Coalition for Social Justice for her pro bono work in Chicago.
Her research interests and scholarly publications focus on understanding immigrant health and families, the contextual influence on health and families, and social demography. Her research was supported by a predoctoral training fellowship from the National Institute of Child Health and Development (NICHD).
Xia Zhang
School of International Letters and Cultures
Xia Zhang teaches courses on the Chinese language, its history, as well as linguistics. Her research interests include Chinese language and linguistics, second language acquisition, especially the acquisition pattern of Chinese grammatical structures, and Chinese language pedagogy.