Congratulations to the Summer 2018 C.V. Starr Fund for A/P/A Research Awardees!
Isabela Acenas (undergraduate student, College of Arts and Sciences ’21) will conduct interviews for “Besides Filipino: How Filipino Youth in America Identify with Other Ethnic Groups.” Focusing on New York City, Acenas will collaborate with the Damayan Migrant Workers Association to interview the children of Filipino migrant workers about race, identity, and affiliation with other groups to complete a comparative, bi-coastal study about identity formation and solidarity.
Professor Tao Goffe (Assistant Professor/Faculty Fellow, Department of Social & Culture Analysis) will travel to Paramaribo, Suriname to attend the 2018 Conference on Slavery, Indentured Labour, Migration, Diaspora, and Identity Formation. She will present her paper “Theorizing a Gastropoetics of Coolitude,” which argues that the residual intimacies of Indigenous, Asian, African, and European encounters can be tasted in the region’s food—the “gastropoetics of coolitude, the creation of new cuisines produced as a result of enslavement and indenture.”
Tommy Le (graduate student, Steinhardt ’18) will conduct participant observation research and interviews with Vietnamese and Vietnamese American farmers and urban growers in New Jersey and New Orleans for “Seeds of Sovereignty: A Study on Vietnamese American Agrarianism.” Le posits that, for these farmers, agriculture serves not only as a site of “economic survival, but [of] community building and intergenerational coping.” His research will counter the erasure of people of color from narratives about the US sustainable agriculture and food movement.
Michael Salgarolo (graduate student, Department of History, PhD candidate) will travel to New Orleans to continue archival and oral history research for his dissertation, “Manila Bayou: Race, Property, and Empire in Filipino Louisiana.” Salgarolo traces the history of Filipino communities, formed by ex-sailors who deserted Spanish merchant ships, in Louisiana from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. His work presents the US South as an alternative site of Asian American racial formation.
The C.V. Starr Fund for Asian/Pacific/American Student Research is available by application to NYU students and scholars working on academic and/or community projects with particular emphasis on the New York metropolitan region. The goal of this Fund is to promote a convergence of theory and practice in A/P/A Studies and its related fields by providing financial support for research expenses and/or conference participation. Learn more and apply.