Asian Pacific American Studies at Amherst College

Stephen Sumida '68 | Professor Emeritus at University of Washington

​

Prior to returning to the University of Washington where he earned his Ph.D. in English in 1982, Stephen H. Sumida taught in the Department of English Language and Literature and Program in American Culture at the University of Michigan (1990-1998), the Departments of Comparative American Cultures and English and the American Studies Program at Washington State University (1981-1990), and the English and American Studies Departments of the University of Hawaii (1970-1980). He committed his scholarship and teaching to Asian American literary studies in 1975, when he became the coordinator of the Pacific Northwest Asian American Writers' Conference, held at the University of Washington in 1976. He went on to be a co-founder of Talk Story Inc., a cultural organization for developing research, creativity, and study in Hawaii's literature and arts. This activity continues today in Hawai'i. From 1986 to 1990 Sumida was a member and chair of the Committee on the Literatures and Languages of America, of the Modern Language Association of America, where scholars in Native American, African American, Chicano/a, Puerto Rican, and Asian/Pacific American literatures, were among the first to construct a view of a multicultural American literature. Sumida went on to serve as President of the Association for Asian American Studies and the American Studies Association. In 2007-2008 he was awarded a Fulbright Professorship to teach in Tokyo, at the distinguished Tsuda College and Tokyo Institute of Technology. He has participated in American Studies projects and given lectures widely around the world, in tune with his American Studies Association presidential themes of a respect for international scholarship in the field and constant attention to how internationalism and US ethnic studies impact each other. In 2011 Sumida has been honored with the James Dolliver Visiting Professorship in the Humanities at the University of Puget Sound.

​

​

Josephine Park '94 | Professor of English at University of Pennsylvania

​

Josephine Park is a member of the faculty steering committee of the Asian American Studies Program, and she specializes in twentieth-century American literature and culture, with an emphasis on American Orientalism and Asian American literature. She is the author Apparitions of Asia: Modernist Form and Asian American Poetics (Oxford 2008), which reads a modern history of American literary alliances with East Asia and was awarded the Literary Book Award by the Association for Asian American Studies, and Cold War Friendships: Korea, Vietnam, and Asian American Literature (Oxford 2016), which examines Asian American subjectivities shaped by wartime alliances in Korea and Vietnam. She is the co-editor (with Paul Stasi) of Ezra Pound in the Present: Essays on Pound's Contemporaneity (Bloomsbury 2016). Her teaching interests include minority literature, American poetry, theories of race and subject formation, modernism, and cold war cultural studies.

​

​

Julia Lee '95 | Associate Professor of Asian American Studies at UC Irvine

​

My book-in-progress, “The Racial Railroad” makes the case that the train is one of the exemplary contact zones through which American literary and cultural texts explore questions of racial subjectivity, community, and conflict. The railroad has played – and continues to play – a crucial role in the formation and perception of racial identity and difference in the United States. This is not to say that all or even most writers who represent racial difference set their works on the railroad, and indeed, there are many places that Americans have come to associate with racial interactions over the past hundred years (e.g., ethnic urban enclaves, the back of a bus, the Mall in Washington D.C., a raft on the Mississippi River). The railroad car, however, is distinct from these other locations in that it is multi-layered and multi-scalar, operating across many registers of meaning both as an invocation of and a depository for all kinds of social, historical, and political narratives great and small. The texts that I will analyze in “The Racial Railroad” range widely in terms of media, genre, time period, and racial politics. They include Currier and Ives’ painting “Across the Continent” (1868), María Ruiz de Burton’s The Squatter and the Don (1885), Willa Cather’s “Chinese” short stories (c. 1900), James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-colored Man (1912), advertisements for leisure travel on the Northern Pacific and Santa Fe Railroads, John Ford’s silent epic film The Iron Horse (1924), Ralph Ellison’s “Boy on a Train” (composed c. 1937, published in 1996), Flannery O’Connor’s “The Artificial Nigger” (1955), Leslie Marmon Silko’s Gardens in the Dune (1999), Frank Chin’s works, Maxine Hong Kingston’s China Men (1980), Bong Joon-Ho’s Snowpiercer (2013), Gore Verbinski’s The Lone Ranger (2013), and Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad (2016). By putting a variety of texts in conversation with other, “The Racial Railroad” demonstrates how and why the train is a particularly important topos in narratives of racial (dis)identification across racial and ethnic lines. Drawing from such a vast literary and cultural archive also enables me to craft an alternative narrative through which to organize American literary history, one that takes into consideration a synchronic conception of literary formation as well as the more traditional, diachronic one.

​

​

Ian Shin '06 | Assistant Professor of History and Asian American Studies at University of Michigan

​

I am a social and cultural historian of the United States. My research and teaching focus on Asian American history and on the history of the U.S. in the Pacific World between 1850 and 1950. I come to this work as a first-generation American who was born in Hong Kong, grew up in California, and spent the past decade and a half on the East Coast. My work is guided not only by my training in historical methods but also by my dedication to critical race and ethnic studies.

​

I am currently working on several projects. My book manuscript—entitled Imperfect Knowledge: Chinese Art and American Power in the Transpacific Progressive Era—examines Chinese art collecting in the U.S. in the early 20th century as a contested process of knowledge production that bolstered ideas of American exceptionalism, even while it relied on transpacific circuits of labor and expertise. Additionally, I am working on articles about the Boy Scout movement in New York’s Chinatown and about the forgotten history of interracial adoption of white children by Chinese parents during the Exclusion Era. I recently completed a book chapter on the role of colleges and universities in U.S.-China relations and Asian immigration in the long 19th century, using Amherst College as a case study.