Mich Ling’s research project frames the foreign exchange student as a queer, diasporic figure in Asian American history by tracing the trajectories of Asian diasporic girls studying in the United States in the nineteenth century. Ling reveals how Asian women’s modern education in the US was facilitated by the rise of settler-colonial and capitalist projects across the transpacific in the late nineteenth century, a process that differentially possessed Native American and Pacific peoples, such as the Lenape, Kānaka Maoli, Ainu, and Okinawans.

Mich Ling is a researcher, writer, archivist, teacher, and organizer. Their research frames East Asian racialization and sexuality as unstable political technologies that emerge through modern struggles for sovereignty in a transpacific context. Their book project traces settler and capitalist entanglements across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, through the gendered, diasporic figure of the Asian exchange student. Mich completed their PhD in women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at Rutgers University, and will begin a postdoctoral research position in Asian American studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign this fall.