Teaching

RCD 179-02 / AAST 194-02 / AMER 194-02

Research Seminar: Asian American Feminisms

This seminar examines representations of gender and sexuality in Asian America from the 19th century to the present. Centering Asian/American women as key historical actors, we employ a transnational feminist lens to frame major themes in Asian American history and culture: immigration, labor, community formation, Orientalism, gendered stereotypes in pop culture, war and military brides, feminist political movements, Asian male masculinity, and family and kinship. We also will examine the “queering” of Asian American history, as well as ideas of masculinity and the intersections of sexuality and racialization for Asian American men. With a distinctive intersectional and transnational feminist lens, this seminar emphasizes how Asian American feminisms are inextricably linked to a broader history of women of color feminisms.

RCD 94-03 / AAST 194

Introduction to Asian American Studies

This course examines the histories of East, South, Southeast Asian migrations and settlement to the United States from the late 18th century to the present. Through historical analyses, memoir, art, film, and digital media, this course seeks to introduce students to the heterogeneous histories, cultural productions, and contemporary issues that shape the study of Asians in the United States. Our work together will address: Who is represented in the category of “Asian American”? What are the formative geographies and histories that constitute “Asia America”? How have notions of “Asianness” and what it means to be “Asian” in the United States shifted over time? Throughout, we will employ transnational and diasporic analyses to examine central themes in Asian American studies including labor migration, community formation, U.S. imperialism, legal exclusion, racial segregation, gender and sexuality, cultural representations, and political resistance.

RCD 50

Introduction to Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora Studies

This course offers an introduction to the major keywords (central terms, concepts, and issues) that shape the field of Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora studies. The featured keywords explored throughout the semester are not meant to be exhaustive or comprehensive of the field in its entirety. 

Indeed, for the sake of cohesion and time constraints, many important keywords could not be included. As cultural studies scholar Raymond Williams suggested in his seminal text, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Society and Culture, the job of a keywords project is to interrogate the varied meanings of key concepts, rather than to offer static definitions. 

Throughout the semester, we derive our coursework from Williams’ model in order to explore the contingent, contested, and often contradictory valences of these terms. In doing so, we will explore major theorists, activists, and scholars who have engaged with these concepts and ideas in ways that allow for rich and multifold readings and interpretations.

RCD Keywords Project – 

The students enrolled in RCD 50 during Fall 2022 (co-taught by Professor Sarah Fong and Professor Courtney Sato) developed the interactive digital repository, Keywords in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora Studies (https://sites.tufts.edu/rcdkeywords/). As a collective project, the site was collaboratively developed to create a digital repository of resources including scholarly texts; audio, visual, and multimedia artistic works; and primary source materials that illuminate key words related to studies of Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora. Students also consulted with Tufts Library Humanities Research Librarian Micah Saxton throughout the project’s development. As an ongoing project, we aim to continue to grow and expand the digital project with future RCD 50 classes, allowing additional students to build upon previous keyword entries and draw new connections.

AAST 194 / RCD 179

Research Seminar: Asian American Mobilities & Transpacific Movements

This seminar draws together Asian American history (ca. 1800-present) and the emerging interdisciplinary field of mobility studies. This course will explore the formation of “Asia America” through Asian American networks and transpacific communities with particular attention to the perspectives and agency of Asian/Americans. Together we will think through and critically interrogate histories and cultures of movements in various forms (lecture and world fair circuits, gendered labor flows, cultures of travel, the figure of the sojourner, international student exchanges, and transportation infrastructure like steamship and railroad lines). Throughout, we will employ transnational and diasporic analyses to examine central themes in Asian American and transpacific studies including immigration, labor, cultural representations, militarism, gender and sexuality, settler colonialism, and political movements and ideologies. With interdisciplinary theory, practice, and research methods as a primary concern, we will examine the history, opportunities, and challenges of interdisciplinary approaches to race, colonialism, and diaspora. Students will have the opportunity to contextualize their emerging research interests from such interdisciplinary theories and methodologies.

AAST 194-01 / RCD 179-04

Histories of Race, Contagion, & Confinement

This upper-level interdisciplinary research seminar investigates how histories of contagion have been deeply intertwined with race, empire, and the construction of public health regimes. Drawing together tools and approaches from history, anthropology, literature, health studies, and critical theory, the seminar asks: how have racial hierarchies shaped the understanding, management, and experience of disease across imperial and diasporic spaces? From colonial quarantine stations and inspection posts controlling immigrant mobility, to sanatoria, internment hospitals, and communities affected by tuberculosis and other infectious diseases, we explore how bodies and borders become sites of governance—and resistance.

 Through case studies spanning the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and across regions (with special attention to Asian American and Pacific histories, including Japanese American incarceration during World War II), we will examine the narrative, archival, and material cultures of disease—medical reports, government documents, visual culture, memoirs, literature—and engage with critical concepts such as biopolitics, racial contagion, carceral medicine, health justice, and the politics of care. Students will be expected to produce a substantial independent research project that bridges primary source work with interdisciplinary scholarship in RCD: combining archival exploration, theoretical framing, and comparative or transnational perspectives.