ASAM Co-Directors
David L. Eng (Ph.D., Berkeley), Richard L. Fisher Professor of English, is a scholar of law, psychoanalysis, Asian American studies, comparative race, and queer theory. Eng is author of four books including, most recently, Reparations and the Human (forthcoming) and Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation: On the Social and Psychic Lives of Asian Americans (2019). In addition, he is co-editor of numerous anthologies, including Loss: The Politics of Mourning (2003) and Q & A: Queer in Asian America (1998). In 2021, Eng was awarded the Kessler Prize, given to a scholar-activist who has produced a body of work that has had a significant influence on the field of LGBTQ Studies. In 2016, he was elected an honorary member of the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (IPTAR) in New York City. Eng is a former member of the Board of Directors of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop and a former Chair of the Board of the Center for LGBTQ Studies (CLAGS). Currently, he is serving on the Committee of Scholars for the new Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum. This spring, Eng is teaching a new seminar on “Asian Americans and Mental Health.”
Dr. Fariha Khan (Ph.D., Penn) teaches courses on South Asians in the U.S., Asian American communities, Asian American food, and American race. After receiving her M.A. in Arabic and Islamic Studies from Yale University, Khan completed her Ph.D. in Folklore and Folklife at Penn. Her current research focuses on South Asian American Muslims, Pakistani American culture, and the Asian American community. From 2015 to 2019, Khan served on the Pennsylvania Governor’s Advisory Commission on Asian Pacific American Affairs. Actively involved in the Philadelphia community, she is Chair of the Board of the Samuel S. Fels Fund and a member of the James Brister Alumni Society at Penn. This spring, Khan is co-teaching a Paideia seminar with Fernando Chang-Muy of the Penn Carey Law School on “American Race: A Philadelphia Story.”
Faculty in Attendance
Hardeep Dhillon (Ph.D., Harvard), Assistant Professor of History and core faculty in the Asian American Studies Program, researches the history of immigration to the U.S., with a focus on the laws and legal practices that shape immigrant lives. Her current book project, tentatively entitled America’s Modern Immigrant Family, investigates the legal construction of the modern immigrant family through the lens of Asian American history. Dhillon has published essays in Law & History Review, Smithsonian Magazine, and The Caravan. In addition, she consults on documentary and other media projects examining the history of immigration in the U.S. This spring, Dhillon is teaching a class “A Nation of Immigrants Reconsidered,” which explores America’s development of immigration and border enforcement across the 20th century.
David Young Kim (Ph.D., Harvard), Associate Professor of History of Art and affiliated faculty in the Asian American Studies Program, specializes in the analysis of theoretical writing, the confrontation of images and texts, and the mechanics of language that function as the art historian’s primary tool. His current project, Lives Found in Translation: Giorgio Vasari in Korea, examines modern translations of Vasari’s Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (1550/1568) into Korean, alongside renderings of this canonical work into German and Portuguese. Kim’s recent monograph, Groundwork: A History of the Renaissance Picture (2022), analyzes the compositional element of the “ground” in Renaissance painting and was named a Best Book of the Year by ArtForum International. This year, Kim is a member in the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study.
Bakirathi Mani (Ph.D., Stanford), Presidential Penn Compact Professor of English and core faculty in the Asian American Studies Program, is a scholar of Asian American, American, and South Asian studies; visual cultural studies; museum and curatorial studies; postcolonial theory; transnational feminist and queer theory; and interdisciplinary methods of research in comparative race and ethnic studies. Mani’s book Unseeing Empire: Photography, Representation, South Asian America (2020), considers how empire continues to haunt contemporary photographic representations of South Asians in America and earned an Honorable Mention Book Award from the Association of Asian American Studies. She is also the author of Aspiring to Home: South Asians in America (2012). This spring, Mani is teaching a course on the “Politics of Solidarity,” which examines solidarity as a political and affective experience, embodied by South Asian immigrants in the U.S. across the 20th century and into the 21st century.
Emily Ng (Ph.D., Berkeley), Assistant Professor of Anthropology and affiliated faculty in the Asian American Studies Program, studies madness and subjectivity, religion and cosmopolitics, and how historical worlds and wounds reverberate across geographies and generations in the Chinese diaspora. Ng has conducted ethnographic research in urban and rural China, and, alongside her anthropological work, she has trained clinically as a psychotherapist. Ng’s book A Time of Lost Gods: Mediumship, Madness, and the Ghost After Mao (2020), explores madness between psychiatric and cosmological registers in modern China. Recently, Ng has been researching sensory experiences of the unseen across religious communities in China. This spring, Ng is teaching a class “Psyche, Trauma, Culture,” which investigates how trauma becomes a basis for the seeking of rights, recognition, and resources during times of collective crisis.
Rupa Pillai (Ph.D., Oregon), Senior Lecturer in Asian American Studies and affiliated faculty in Anthropology, investigates the intersection of race, religion, and migration in the Americas. Her doctoral thesis, “Caribbean Hinduism on the Move,” is based on ethnographic fieldwork in the Caribbean and with the growing Indo-Caribbean American community in New York City. Through her research, Pillai explores how this community adapts and mobilizes Hinduism across multiple migrations, first from the Indian subcontinent and second from the Caribbean, to carve a space for themselves within the social landscape of New York City. This spring, Pillai is teaching a course on “The Asian Caribbean,” and she has also recently developed a new seminar on “The Asian American Entrepreneur.”