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

Kavita Gawrinauth’s (PhD student, NYU Graduate School of Arts & Science ’30) project examines Indo-Guyanese migration, memory, and religious institution-building by tracing how mandirs and devotional practices helped preserve, reconstruct, and transmit diasporic histories between Guyana and New York. With support from the C.V. Starr Fund for A/P/A Research, Gawrinauth will travel to Guyana to conduct research on family memory, archival materials, and community-based sources connected to Indo-Guyanese religious life and migration.

Madeleine Han (Visiting Academic, A/P/A Institute at NYU) will conduct ethnographic research in former “camptowns” (base host cities) in South Korea. Han’s dissertation examines the contemporary cultural and spatial politics surrounding US militarism in South Korea by focusing on the ongoing redevelopment of former US kijich’ons. How do contemporary memorial struggles over former kijich’ons become part of making and narrating war and peace, state and nation, and culture and sovereignty? 

Andrew Hsiao (Visiting Academic, A/P/A Institute at NYU) is working on a cultural history of a multicultural cohort of radical artists and intellectuals who met and began making art in Depression-era New York City. A number of these artists first crossed paths in Greenwich Village’s John Reed Club, a Communist Party-adjacent arts group, and brought revolutionary ideas into pop culture (through fashion, comics, tabloids, movies, theater, and pulp fiction, among other media). Hsiao will consult the Josephine Fowler Papers at UCLA’s Charles E. Young Research Library. Fowler conducted groundbreaking research into Asian American communists as well as gay and lesbian activism of the early 20th century.

Subi Lee (MA student, NYU Steinhardt ’26) will present her research at the 2026 World Confederation of Cognitive and Behavioural Therapies Congress in San Francisco, California. Lee’s study examines how acculturative stress impacts the mental health of East Asian international young adults, focusing on the role of specific difficulties in emotion regulation. Findings highlight key emotional processes that can inform more targeted and culturally responsive mental health interventions.