2024-25 A/P/A Institute Visiting Scholars & Visiting Academics 

Visiting Scholars, 2024-25

Christine Bacareza Balance will begin research for and development of Renaissance Renegade, an archival and critical companion to Jessica Hagedorn’s performance and theater work. Created in collaboration with Lucy San Pablo Burns (UCLA) and Hagedorn herself, this project aims to bring more critical attention to Hagedorn’s deep roots as a performer, playwright, and collaborator in New York City’s theater/performance worlds from the late 1970s until today. This project builds upon work begun at and for the event, Renaissance Renegade: A Jessica Hagedorn Retrospective hosted by the A/P/A Institute at NYU in 2012.

Rose Cuison-Villazor will be working on two book projects. The first is a monograph that explores how the US government deployed immigration and citizenship laws in Japan after World War II to separate Japanese and American couples and families and the ways in which Japanese American families challenged those laws. The second project will be the first book-length treatment that sets forth what constitutes AsianCrit or critical race theory (CRT) as applied to Asian Americans. 

Subhalakshmi Gooptu will work on a chapter titled “Rendering Agency” for her book manuscript which examines the use of textiles, fabrics, cloth and dressing in multimedia exhibits by Indo-Caribbean visual artists in New York City. She will also conduct archival research in the NYU Tamiment Library & Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives for an article, titled “Andolan in the Archives,” that traces narratives of South Asian American labor movements, organizations, and community building. 

Junyoung Verónica Kim will work on two book projects. Exploring literary, visual, and cinematic texts across Asia-Latin America, the first monograph–Cacophonous Intimacies: Reorienting Diaspora and Race in Asia-Latin America–centers Asian diaspora(s) in Latin America and reveals the intimacies between seemingly disparate histories of multiple imperialisms (Japanese, Spanish and US), hemispheric American settler colonialism, and postcolonial nation building in both East Asia and Latin America. The second project tentatively titled Nuclear Diaspora: Asian-Latin American Genealogies, the Black Pacific, and the Korean War examines the intersections, relations, and slippages between indigenous dispossession (e.g., Guåhan, Okinawa, Jeju), anti-blackness, and hemispheric American racial formation of “the Asian” during the unending Korean War.

ManSee Kong and Anna Ozbek are collaborating on a short documentary about Tomie Arai, A/P/A Institute’s first Artist-in-Residence. Their film highlights Arai’s influential art-making and cultural organizing work over the course of several decades—from her involvement with Basement Workshop in the 1970s to her present-day work with Chinatown Art Brigade. While at NYU, Kong and Ozbek will conduct research on Arai’s artist-in-residency at A/P/A and her recent work with A/P/A Voices: A COVID-19 Public Memory Project.

Maya Singhal will continue work on their book manuscript, Safer, a historical and ethnographic account of Chinese, Black, and Latine approaches to community safety in New York City’s Chinatown and the Lower East Side from the 1960s to the present.

Interdisciplinary artist Chanika Svetvilas will conduct research on the A/P/A Voices: A COVID-19 Public Memory Project to examine the mental health impact of the pandemic through a disability justice lens. Additionally, she will explore the papers of Dr. Gloria Wong Chung, who was one of the first Asian American women psychiatrists to specialize in adolescent psychiatry. This research will inform new creative work for her upcoming solo show at the Hunterdon Art Museum in Clinton, New Jersey.

Visiting Academics, 2024-25

Aditya Kumar will continue his dissertation research project, which explores the response to India’s 1975 Emergency on behalf of the Indian American diaspora, drawing on archival analysis and oral interviews with former organizers to consider several interrelated inquiries. Attentive to modes of coalitional organizing from the Third World Left to the emergent Hindu Right, Kumar’s work engages canonical Asian American Movement historiography to argue that the inclusion of Indian and South Asian activism radically reshapes conventional political geographies and complicates assumptions about the coherence of a singular Third World Left.

Jul Jeonghyun Parke will research the racial baggage of “virtual influencers,” AI- or CGI- generated humanlike characters who exist on popular social media platforms as fashion models and influencers. This study will involve A/P/A archival collections which demonstrate a historical association of Asians and Asian American subjects with the robotic, machinic, futuristic, and technological. She will also work with Professor Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu to extend the study of skin as colonial technology to the context of immersive and augmented virtual worlds.

Minh Huynh Vu will continue writing their dissertation project, entitled “Corrugated Care,” which examines the cardboard box as an everyday technology of war and capitalism. Charting the contiguities of corrugation across global military and market campaigns—with the makeshift cardboard cribs of Operation Babylift as the central case study—the project diagrams the imbricating infrastructure of US empire and its enfoldments across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.