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

Kristy Lai’s (PhD candidate, NYU Steinhardt ‘27) project—“A Web of Support: Grounding a Mixed-Methods Study on the Voices of Chinese/American Parents of Young Bilingual Children in NYC”—partners with Chinese parents to explore whether and how caregivers use digital media platforms to shape and sustain family practices around language and culture. Grounded in community insights from in-depth parent interviews, this qualitative research phase of the project culminates in Summer 2025 with a free, public, and celebratory share-out event in New York City, designed to amplify parent voices, foster collective joy, and build community knowledge.

Yuexi (Lexi) Licheng (BS student, NYU Steinhardt ‘25) will present her study, “Deliberate vs. Intrusive Rumination: Associations with Chinese International Students’ Mental Health” at the American Psychological Association 2025 Convention in Denver Colorado. Licheng’s study examines how different types of rumination affect the mental health of Chinese international students in the US.

Minh Huynh Vu (Visiting Academic, A/P/A Institute at NYU) will conduct archival research for their dissertation, “On Cardboard and the Endless Enfoldments of U.S. Empire,” which is a cultural history of the cardboard box and its infrastructural centrality to US empire in Asia and the Pacific. Vu will travel to the University of Chicago, which houses the archives of the Container Corporation of America. The CCA was not only one of the earliest manufacturers of military-grade corrugated boxes (used across World War II and the Korean War), but also functioned as a design firm of sorts, hiring Bauhaus-trained artists to illustrate mid-century modern advertisement campaigns including the “Paperboard Goes to War” series.

Mariko Chin Whitenack (PhD candidate, NYU GSAS ‘26) will return to Oʻahu to visit the Hawaiʻi State Archives and several community restoration sites to complete research for, “Resources as Relations: Reforestation, Reproduction, and Restoration in Hawaiʻi’s Watersheds.” Whitenack’s dissertation examines early twentieth century and contemporary forest restoration projects as competing sites of Indigenous rebuilding ancestral relations to land and capitalist resource exploitation.