Congratulations to the Spring 2023 C.V. Starr Fund for A/P/A Research Awardees!
Gracia Brown (MA Student, NYU GSAS ’23) will conduct fieldwork and oral histories for, “What About The Children? Oral Histories About Growing Up Mixed Asian Before Loving v. Virginia.” This capstone project aims to highlight and explore the lives of mixed-race Asian Americans born before the Supreme Court legalized interracial marriages across the United States in 1967.
Linda Luu (PhD student, NYU GSAS) will present their paper, “Militarized Landscapes and the Virtuality of Memory” at the 2023 Association for Asian American Studies Annual Conference in Long Beach, California. The paper looks at the racialized and gendered underpinnings of a virtual reality therapy treatment for Vietnam veterans called Virtual Vietnam and is a part of Luu’s larger dissertation project on the role of the Vietnam War and US militarism on the development of psychological theories and technologies of trauma.
Jacinda Tran (Visiting Scholar, NYU) will present, “Visualizing Southeast Asia through Militarized Technologies of Detection” at the 2023 Association for Asian American Studies Annual Conference in Long Beach, California. Tran’s research demonstrates how techniques of visualization actually obscured the landscape by conflating and targeting both Southeast Asia and Southeast Asians simultaneously as sites for eradication.
At the 2023 Association for Asian American Studies (AAAS) Annual Conference in Long Beach, California, Mariko Chin Whitenack (PhD Student, NYU GSAS) will to present a paper examining the colonial idea that nonnative plants were needed to meet the demands of Hawaiʻi’s advancing society during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The paper tracks how the Hawaiian Sugar Planters’ Association sought to replace koa and ʻōhiʻa forests with nonnative trees such as strangler figs to create “mixed blood” forests that they believed would better capture and retain groundwater needed for plantation agriculture.