Spring 2025 C.V. Starr Fund for A/P/A Research Awardees

Hala Al Shami (MA student, NYU Steinhardt ‘25) will attend the Media Fields Graduate Conference at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she will discuss her archival research on Palestinian nationalism in the early twentieth century. Her work addresses the tensions of accessing colonial archives, and argues for the importance of studying decolonial resistance while the settler state and its allies obscure and censor these histories in order to foster ignorance, stifle revolutionary potential, and manufacture consent for genocide.

Adi Kumar‘s (Visiting Scholar, A/P/A Institute at NYU) research explores the response of the Indian American diaspora to India’s 1975 Emergency. With support from C.V. Starr Grant for A/P/A Research, he will conduct archival research related to the Chicago- and New York-based anti-Emergency groups active in the 1970s. Additionally, he will interview members of the prominent anti-Emergency group Indians for Democracy (IFD), many of whom were at the forefront of the Indian American opposition to the Emergency.

Rui Liu (PhD student, NYU GSAS) will attend the Global Asias Conference at the University of California, Irvine  and the Association for Asian American Studies annual conference to present her paper “The Aperture of Revolution: Visions of Chinese/American Transimperialism in Jenny Xie’s The Rupture Tense.” Liu’s paper examines how diasporic re-visions of the Chinese Cultural Revolution destabilize Cold War binaries of victim and perpetrator, and communism and capitalism in a time of resurgent Asian/American nationalisms.

Linda Luu (PhD candidate, NYU GSAS) will attend the Association for Asian American Studies annual conference in Boston, Massachusetts to present their paper “From the Countryside to the Clinic: Vietnamese Wartime and Refugee Affect, Culture, and Mental Health” as part of a panel on “Abolitionist Feminist and Decolonial Perspectives on Asian American Mental Health.” The paper challenges the notion of “culture” as it is mobilized in refugee and cross-cultural psychology and reveals its roots in area studies and military-sponsored research during the war that attempted to know the racially inscrutable other. 

Daniella Occhineri (MA Student, NYU GSAS) will complete her capstone project, “Capturing Paradise: Imagining Hawaiʻi and Okinawa through 20th Century Postcards.” The interactive digital exhibition examines postcards as evidence of how imperial powers reimagined sites of war in Asia and the Pacific into tropical vacation destinations. The exhibition aims to unsettle the “tourist gaze” by exposing the colonial origins and militourist function of popular postcard imagery from Hawaiʻi and Okinawa.