Intercollegiate Department of Asian American Studies

Sharon G. Goto
Joint Appointment
1994. Pomona, Associate Professor, Psychology
Ph.D., University of Illinois.
Office: Lincoln 2101, Pomona College
Phone: 909-621-8854

Dr. Goto is an Associate Professor of Psychology and Asian American Studies. Her research interests include perceptions of discrimination experienced by Asian Americans, and the mental health and organizational consequences of discrimination. She is also interested in looking at cultural differences in cognition and brain activation patterns. She teaches courses in Asian American psychology and industrial/organizational psychology.

Wei-Chin Hwang
Affiliate
2003. Claremont McKenna, Assistant Professor, Psychology
Ph.D., University of California, Los Angeles
Office: Seaman 234, Claremont McKenna College
Phone: 909-607-2762

Dr. Hwang is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at Claremont McKenna College. He double majored in Psychology and Asian Studies at the University of Utah, and received his Ph.D. from the Clinical Psychology program at UCLA (2003). He did his predoctoral fellowship at Richmond Area Multi-Services (RAMS), National Asian American Psychology Training Center and his clinical-research postdoctoral fellowship at Harbor UCLA Medical Center. He worked as an Assistant Professor at the University of Utah during 2003-2006. His dissertation was on the factors that predict depression in Chinese Americans. His research interests include ethnic, racial, and cultural issues in mental health and conceptualizations of mental illness, with an emphasis on affective disorders. Specifically, he is interested in differences in the expression of distress, cross-cultural validity of diagnostic and assessment instruments, immigration and adaptation issues, and the prevalence and etiology of psychopathology across ethnic populations. His most recent work focuses on cultural competency and adaptation of services for ethnic minorities, as well as improving immigrant family relations. He has authored numerous clinical and research articles in the field of minority mental health. Dr. Hwang is a clinical psychologist and also maintains a private practice in Claremont and Pasadena.

YouYoung Kang
Affiliate
1999. Scripps, Associate Professor, Music
Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania
Office: PAC218, Scripps College
Phone: 909-607-8760

Dr. Kang is Associate Professor of Music at Scripps College and currently Chair of the Music Department. Her work broaches a wide variety of subjects including music theory pedagogy, Korean/Korean American music, the WPA Federal Music Project in the US, and 17th c. Italian composition and theory.

Thomas Kim
Affiliate
2000. Scripps, Associate Professor, Politics and International Relations
Ph.D., University of California, San Diego
Office: Lincoln 1119, Pomona College
Phone: 909-607-0975

Dr. Kim is presently Associate Professor of Politics and International Relations at Scripps College, and the Chair of the Intercollegiate Department of Asian American Studies at the Claremont Colleges. He is also the Executive Director of the Korea Policy Institute (http://www.kpolicy.org), an independent research and educational institute whose mission is to provide timely analysis of United States policies toward Korea and developments on the Korean peninsula. Dr. Kim has been interviewed dozens of times on U.S. and international radio and television, and he has been quoted in numerous journals and newspapers including The New York Times, The International Herald Tribune, Congressional Quarterly Weekly, and The Nation. He is the author of The Racial Logic of Politics: Asian Americans and Two-Party Competition (Temple University Press, 2006). Dr. Kim's insights and op-eds have been published in U.S. and South Korean newspapers as well as the U.S. Congressional Record.

Ming-Yuen Ma
Affiliate
2001. Pitzer, Associate Professor, Media Studies
M.F.A., California Institute of the Arts
Office: Scott 213, Pitzer College
Phone: 909-607-4319
Link to Website
Ma has been making experimental videos for more than 15 years. His videotapes Sniff (1997), Slanted Vision (1995), Toc Storee (1992), and Aura (1991) have screened national and internationally. Ma's recent projects include the multimedia Xin Lu Project, including the four videos: [os] (2007), Movements East—West (2003), Mother/Land (2000), and Myth(s) of Creation (1997), which use personal and family history to explore the shifting identities of peoples in movement - as tourist, traveler, immigrant, refugee, exile. [os], the most recently completed video in the series, excavates the personal and the collective, the colonial and the transnational, the traumatic, the wistful, the queer, and the spectral to tell intersecting stories about our desires to return to the past. Its title represents the etymological ‘"ghost’" that haunts the creation of the word "nostalgia", which combines the Greek word nostos (return home) and New Latin algia (akin to Greek neisthai to return).

Lynne Miyake
Affiliate
1989. Pomona, Professor, Modern Languages and Literatures
Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley
Office: Mason 205, Pomona College
Phone: 909-621-8931

Miyake’s training is in classical Japanese literature and she works extensively in the narrative prose and diary literature traditions of the tenth through twelfth centuries. She examines the different narrative strategies employed by authors, narrators and readers in the creation of the textual experience. She also looks at how gender is configured by/in the various players, for example, in a narrator who is a continuum composite of male and female rather than simply one or the other. Her interests are in post-structuralism, feminism and cultural studies, and she teaches a course in Japanese and Japanese American autobiography.

Joseph Parker
Affiliate
1989. Pitzer, Associate Professor, International and Intercultural Studies
Ph.D., Harvard University
Office: Broad Center 213, Pitzer College
Phone: 909-607-4318

Joe Parker is an Associate Professor in the International and Intercultural Studies field group at Pitzer college, where he is also affiliated with Gender and Feminist Studies, Media Studies, and Asian American Studies. His interdisciplinary courses range from media representations of Asian Americans and Asia to multiracial community studies; U.S. cultural politics; critiques of Eurocentrism, nationalisms, and ethnocentrisms; intersections of gender, sexual orientation, race, and class; and the politics of knowledge. His research pursues ways that feminism, diaspora studies, postcolonialism, queer studies, and cultural studies may question modern conceptions of experience, justice, knowledge, and culture to find new frameworks for social relations and academic practices.

Seung Hye Suh
Affiliate
2002. Scripps, Assistant Professor, English
Ph.D., Columbia University
Office: Humanities 220, Scripps College
Phone: 909-607-4026

Seung Hye Suh, Ph.D., is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Scripps College and member of the core faculty of the Intercollegiate Department of Asian American Studies at the Claremont Colleges. Professor Suh specializes in American literature and cultural studies, Korea, and Asian American Studies. In IDAAS, she regularly teaches courses in Asian American literature and cultural criticism, postcolonial theory and imperialism, and Asian American communities. She is on the steering committee of the Alliance for Scholars Concerned About Korea (www.asck.org) and a fellow of the Korea Policy Institute (www.kpolicy.org). She has also worked extensively with nonprofit organizations in the Korean community. Dr. Suh is often interviewed on the radio and regularly speaks on Korea and Korean American issues at academic conferences, colleges and universities, and community-based organizations.

Hung Cam Thai
Joint Appointment
2003. Pomona, Assistant Professor, Sociology
Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley
Office: Hahn 218, Pomona College
Phone: 909-607-3922

Hung Cam Thai is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Asian American Studies at Pomona College in Claremont, California. His general areas of interests are race and ethnicity, gender, immigration, and the family. Thai is an ethnographic sociologist and his research is motivated by questions of how state policies (such as immigration laws) intrude on what we often view as the realm of the private, which is to say the family and intimate relations. His research employs interviews and participant observations and aligns with feminist and race theories. He has conducted research in Vietnam and in the United States with a special focus on Vietnamese transpacific marriages. His book, For Better or For Worse: Marriage and Migration in the New Global Economy, is in-press with Rutgers University Press.

Richard Tsujimoto
Affiliate
1973. Pitzer, Professor, Psychology
Ph.D., State University of New York, Stony Brook
Office: Scott 236, Pitzer College
Phone: 909-607-3779

Tsujimoto is a licensed clinical psychologist. He is involved with the Vision Mentoring Program, which works with the Department of Probation to improve the life prospects of Asian American gang members.

Linus Yamane
Affiliate
1988. Pitzer, Professor, Economics
Ph.D., Yale University
Office: Fletcher 216, Pitzer College
Phone: 909-607-3769
Link to website
Yamane is a Professor of Economics and Asian American Studies at Pitzer College and a core faculty member in the Intercollegiate Department of Asian American Studies. He has a B.S. in Economics from M.I.T., and a Ph.D. in Economics from Yale University. His research has covered macro, labor, Japan, and Asian American Studies, and he likes to tell economics jokes. He is currently studying the labor market status of Asian Americans using 1990 and 2000 census data exploring various issues dealing with labor market discrimination. He has spent some time at the Japan Development Bank, the World Bank, AT&T Bell Laboratories, and the National Bureau of Economic Research. He has also taught at Wellesley College, Harvard University, and Yale University. He has been at Pitzer College since 1988.

Kathleen S. Yep
Joint Appointment
2004. Pitzer, Assistant Professor, Ethnic Studies
Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley
Office: Bernard 217, Pitzer College
Phone: 909-607-2645

Dr. Kathleen S. Yep is an assistant professor of Asian American Studies and Sociology at Pitzer College. After completing her doctorate from the Ethnic Studies Department at the University of California at Berkeley, Yep was a University of California Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Her research interests include cultural politics, social movements, feminist and anti-racist pedagogies, and oral historiography. Yep has published in the Sociology of Sport Journal and the Asian American Policy Review. Currently, she is working on a manuscript that explores the racial and gender politics of Chinatown basketball in the 1930s and 1940s. The book features oral histories with working-class Chinese American women and men who collectively used their athletic bodies to mediate social inequalities. In addition, she is co-authoring a young adult novel about immigrating through Angel Island in the 1920s. To be published by Harper Collins, the novel is based on the immigration files of her grandfather. The co-author is Dr. Laurence Yep, the recipient of the Laura Ingalls Wilder Lifetime Achievement in Children’s Literature and the author of over thirty young adult novels about Chinese and Chinese Americans.

David Yoo
Affiliate
1994. Claremont McKenna, Associate Professor, History
Ph.D., Yale University
Office: Seaman 222, Claremont McKenna College
Phone: 909-607-2828

David K. Yoo is Associate Professor of History at Claremont McKenna College, and Core Faculty, Intercollegiate Department of Asian American Studies at the Claremont Colleges. He is the author of Growing Up Nisei, editor of New Spiritual Homes, and co-editor of Religion and Spirituality in Korean America (forthcoming). His current research focuses on early Korean American history.

AFFILIATED FACULTY
Affiliated faculty have strong interests in Asian American Studies.

Mita Banerjee, 1992. Pitzer, Associate Professor, Psychology. Ph.D., University of Michigan.

Hal Barron, 1979. Harvey Mudd, Professor, History. Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania.

Dipannite Basu, 1995. Pitzer, Associate Professor, Sociology. Ph.D., Manchester University.

Emily Chao, 1996. Pitzer, Associate Professor, Anthropology. Ph.D., University of Michigan.

Bruce Coats, 1985. Scripps, Professor, Art History. Ph.D., Harvard University.

Hao Huang, 1994. Scripps, Associate Professor, Music. D.M.A., State University of New York, Stony Brook.

Mitsuru Kubota, 1959. Harvey Mudd, Professor, Chemistry. Ph.D., University of Illinois.

Genevieve Lee, 1994. Pomona, Associate Professor, Music. D.M.A., Yale Univeristy.

Thomas Poon, 2000. Joint Science, Assistant Professor, Chemistry. Ph.D., UCLA.

Kim-Trang Tran, 1998. Scripps, Assistant Professor, Media Studies.

Samuel Yamashita, 1983. Pomona, Professor, History. Ph.D., University of Michigan.