Spring 2026 C.V. Starr Fund for A/P/A Research Awardees

Dang Weiyu (PhD candidate, NYU GSAS) will present a paper at the 2026 Association for Asian Studies Annual Conference in Vancouver, Canada. “The Asian Business: The Interwar Origins of Area Studies, the Crisis of the Humanities, and the Moral Cultivation of US Empire” shows how interwar philanthropic and academic institutions mobilized the study of Asia and the Pacific as a moral instrument of US global power by defining racism as a predominantly international problem, distinct from domestic racial struggles, to be managed through the disciplined production of cultural understanding.

Hady A. Elrafei (PhD student, NYU GSAS) will participate in panels at the Critical Mixed Race Studies (CMRS) Association Conference in Los Angeles, California and the Association for Asian American Studies Annual (AAAS) Conference in Honolulu, Hawaiʻi. At AAAS, Elfrafei will present, “Gaza 2035: AI (de)Generation and Visual Cultures of Dispossession in Transpacific Palestine.” The dissertation chapter examines the aesthetic and discursive strategies of popular AI-generated images of Gaza as emergent technologies of settler colonial dispossession. Through a transpacific method, this project asks how these technologies call up existing, emergent, and imagined flows of labor, culture, and globality between SWANA regions and the Asias at large. 

Reese Yau (MA candidate, NYU GSAS) will attend The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States Conference in Austin, Texas to present their paper, “Tender Flesh: Theorizing the Hybrid Embodied Poetics of the Asian American Queer Femme in Franny Choi’s Soft Science” as part of a panel called “Unknowing Unbounded: Asian/American Femininities at the Edge” and will also virtually present their paper, “‘Created from Exploding Spit’: More-Than-Human Transpacific Relationalities in Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner’s ‘Monster’” at The Asian Conference on Cultural Studies. Their papers examine how decolonial feminist of color poetics can navigate the fraught conditions of gendered racialization by mobilizing nonhuman, monstrous, and grotesque aesthetics as a form of resistance and intimacy.