Spring 2024 C.V. Starr Fund for A/P/A Research Awardees

Michelle M. Lee (PhD candidate in social psychology, NYU GSAS) will present her paper, “When Race Persuades: Perceptions of Racially Diverse Conservative Advocates” at the 2024 Association for Asian American Studies Annual Conference in Seattle, Washington. A culmination of four studies using social psychological research methods, Lee’s paper draws from theories of racial and political stereotyping, persuasion, social categorization, and racial triangulation of Asian Americans to experimentally assess whether people’s perceptions of activists advocating for conservative causes differ by activists’ race. 

Anh Phuong Nguyen ​​(PhD candidate in English and American literature, NYU GSAS) will attend the 2024 American Comparative Literature Association Annual Meeting in Montreal, Canada to present her paper, “Nuclear Cosmopolitanism: Blurring the Global and the Local in Makoto Oda’s Hiroshima.” Putting Oda’s text in conversation with the frameworks of postcolonial studies and transpacific studies, Nguyen’s paper examines the interaction between the global imaginaries and local ruminations over nuclear destruction in postwar Japan in Makoto Oda’s 1981 novel Hiroshima. 

Mark Tseng-Putterman (Visiting Scholar, A/P/A Institute at NYU) will continue his inquiry on Asian American internationalism by conducting archival research in the Katipunan ng mga Demokratikong Pilipino (KDP) [Union of Democratic Filipinos] records at University of Washington. Focusing on Filipino American community debates over martial law in the Philippines, this study will add to a larger examination of how Asian American engagements with foreign policy in their countries of ancestry reshaped the parameters of racial, national, and diasporic identification during the Cold War.

Ida Yalzadeh (Visiting Scholar, A/P/A Institute at NYU) will conduct archival research at NYU Special Collections pertaining to Japanese American activists involved in the post-World War II redress movement. She plans to incorporate her research into an article that examines the legacy of Japanese American incarceration within the Iranian diasporic community in the United States. 

Nari Yoo (PhD candidate in social work, NYU Silver)’s dissertation, “Unraveling Ethnic Disparities: Spatial and Virtual Access to Mental Health Services among Immigrants with Language Barriers” focuses on improving mental health services for Spanish, Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean, and Tagalog speakers in the US. Utilizing computational, quantitative, and qualitative methods informed by the Public Health Critical Race Praxis and the Network Episode Model II, Yoo aims to develop a Multilingual Mental Healthcare Accessibility Index and conduct qualitative research on telemental health experiences among immigrant populations.