Intercollegiate Department of Asian American Studies

The Claremont Colleges

Mission

Program

Courses

Faculty

Staff

Student

Representatives

Research Links

Library

Jobs/Internships/Volunteering

Press Release

Photos

Contact

Click on the IDAAS logo in the top left corner of this page to read the story behind the logo.

The Intercollegiate Department of Asian American Studies at The Claremont Colleges is proud to announce that Dr. Kathleen S. Yep published a young adult novel with her uncle, Dr. Laurence Yep, the recipient of the Laura Ingalls Wilder Lifetime Achievement in Children’s Literature and two-time Newbery honor winner.

Distributed by HarperCollins, Dragon’s Child tells the story of a father and son from rural China immigrating to San Francisco in 1922. The Yeps draw on family stories, immigration records, ship blueprints and memories of Laurence's own conversations with his father to tell the story of Chinese immigration and Angel Island. The American Library Association’s Booklist describes Dragon's Child as a "stirring narrative " and a "dramatic blend of fact and fiction." The novel also includes family photos, a historical note, a bibliography, and web resources on Angel Island. Dragon’s Child resonates with current examples of immigration interrogations, detentions and deportations.

Professor 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, the Journal of Asian American Studies, and the Asian American Policy Review.
 

New Book edited by Professor David Yoo (5/12/08)
RELIGION AND SPIRITUALITY IN KOREAN AMERICA
David K. Yoo and Ruth H. Chung, editors
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008

Religion and Spirituality in Korean America examines the ambivalent identities of predominantly Protestant Korean Americans in Judeo-Christian American culture. Focusing largely on the migration of Koreans to the United States since 1965, this interdisciplinary collection investigates campus faith groups and adoptees and probes how factors such as race, the concept of diaspora, and the improvised creation of sacred spaces shape Korean American religious identity and experience. In calling attention to important trends in Korean American spirituality, this volume highlights a high rate of religious involvement in urban places and participation in a transnational religious community.

Contributors include Ruth H. Chung, Jae Ran Kim, Jung Ha Kim, Rebecca Kim, Sharon Kim, Okyun Kwon, Sang Hyun Lee, Anselm Kyongsuk Min, Sharon A. Suh, Sung Hyun Um, and David K. Yoo.

Professor David K. Yoo is an associate professor of history at Claremont McKenna College and a core faculty member of the Asian American Studies Department at The Claremont Colleges. He is the author of Growing Up Nisei and editor of New Spiritual Homes. His current research focuses on early Korean American history.
 

New Book by Professor Hung Cam Thai (5/12/08)
FOR BETTER OR FOR WORSE:
Vietnamese International Marriages in the New Global Economy
Hung Cam Thai
(Rutgers University Press, 2008)

In For Better or For Worse, Hung Cam Thai takes a closer look at marriage and migration, with a specific focus on the unions between Vietnamese men living in the United States and the women who marry them. Weaving together a series of personal stories, he underscores the ironies and challenges that these unions face. He includes the voices of working-class immigrant men dealing with marginalization in their adopted country. These men speak about wanting "traditional" wives who they hope will recognize their gendered authority. Meanwhile, young Vietnamese college-educated women, undesirable to bachelors in their own country who are seeking subservient wives, express a preference for men of the same ethnicity but with a more liberal outlook on gender—men they imagine they will find in the United States. A sense of foreboding pervades the book as Thai captures the contrasting viewpoints of the couples who appear to be separated not only geographically but ideologically.

Professor Wei-Chin Hwang Awarded NIMH Grant for Cultural Competency Research (11/15/07)

A five-year National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) grant is establishing a new Asian American Center on Disparities Research at the University of California, Davis. The Center will conduct and facilitate research specific to Asian American populations and their mental health treatment, including medication and psychotherapy evaluations. The principal investigator and director of the Center is Dr. Nolan Zane.

The Intercollegiate Department of Asian American Studies at The Claremont Colleges is proud to announce that Dr. Wei-Chin Hwang was selected as a program leader in one of Center’s three projects. He will oversee a large project to determine whether therapist cultural competency is related to mental health treatment outcomes for ethnic minority clients. Over a five-year span, this project will track the treatment progress of thousands of patients being treated by hundreds of clinicians. Dr. Hwang joins nearly a dozen key participants from UC Davis and the University of Oregon in building the new center.

Dr. Hwang is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at Claremont McKenna College and a core faculty member of the Asian American Studies Department at The Claremont Colleges. He double majored in Psychology and Asian Studies at the University of Utah, and received his Ph.D. from the Clinical Psychology program at University of California, Los Angeles in 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.

Professor Wei-Chin Hwang Awarded NIMH Exploratory Research Grant for Adapting Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) for Chinese Americans (11/15/07)

The Intercollegiate Department of Asian American Studies at The Claremont Colleges is proud to announce that Dr. Wei-Chin Hwang was awarded a three-year exploratory research grant by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). The goal of this study is to culturally adapt a cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) manual for use with depressed Chinese American patients. This study will be among the first to develop a culturally adapted evidence-based treatment (EBT) for use with this ethnic group and will involve three study phases. Phase I of the study will focus on modifying and refining a CBT intervention protocol into a manualized treatment for Chinese Americans. Phase two involves a randomized controlled trial (RCT) comparing the effects of the culturally adapted CBT treatment manual with nonadapted CBT. Phase three will involve further refinement of the treatment manual, data analysis, and report writing.

Dr. Hwang is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at Claremont McKenna College and a core faculty member of the Asian American Studies Department at The Claremont Colleges. He double majored in Psychology and Asian Studies at the University of Utah, and received his Ph.D. from the Clinical Psychology program at University of California, Los Angeles in 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.

Professor Kathleen S. Yep Awarded Carnegie Foundation Faculty Fellowship (9/7/07)

The Intercollegiate Department of Asian American Studies at The Claremont Colleges is proud to announce that Dr. Kathleen S. Yep was selected as a Faculty Fellow for the California Campus Compact-Carnegie Foundation Faculty Fellows Service-Learning for Political Engagement Program. Only twenty five faculty members from across the state were chosen for this honor. As a Faculty Fellow, she will be working with other colleagues from a wide variety of disciplines over the next two years to create, implement and reflect on service learning in at least one of her courses with the goal of increasing students’ understanding, skills and motivation for political participation.

Professor 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.

The Intercollegiate Department of Asian American Studies (IDAAS) was established in 1998 and currently has a core of thirteen faculty who teach and research in Asian American Studies. At the heart of its program, IDAAS offers an array of classes each academic year that addresses Asian Pacific American issues and populations. The department’s curriculum in the humanities and social sciences includes courses in the arts, ethnic studies, history, literature, psychology, sociology, and a number of interdisciplinary areas of study. For more information, please visit the website at http://www.idaas.org.
 

Professor Ming-Yuen S. Ma Receives Tenure (9/7/07)

The Intercollegiate Department of Asian American Studies at The Claremont Colleges is proud to announce that Professor Ming-Yuen Ma was awarded tenure and promoted to Associate Professor.

Professor Ma was born in Buffalo, New York, and was raised in Hong Kong. He was educated at Columbia University and California Institute of the Arts. 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).

Ma's critical writing and text-based art has been included in many anthologies and journals, and his work has been written about by critics and theorists including Laura Marks, (The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses, 2000) Roger Garcia, (Out of the Shadows: Asians in American Cinema, 2001) Bérénice Reynaud, (Resolutions: Contemporary Video Practices, 1996) Holly Willis, and Gina Marchetti. Most recently, Asian American scholars Peter Feng and Xiaojing Zhou wrote about the Xin Lu Project for separate forthcoming publications. Ma’s own recent publications include Untitled (Dear Ma Liuming), in X-TRA (Winter 2006), Untitled (Dear Mr. Rocha) in Release Print (November 2005), A Conversation About Women, Gay Men, and AIDS, (with Richard Fung) in Corpus (Spring 2006). He contributed an essay, The Voice of Blindness: On the Sound Tactics of Tran T. Kim-Trang's Blindness Series, for the book More Than Meets the Eye: Critical Essays on Tran T. Kim-Trang's Blindness Series (forthcoming). He was also interviewed for the documentary Dragon Ladies and Kung-Fu Masters: Reconstructing Asian American Sexuality (sexTV), and the ACT UP Oral History Project.

The Intercollegiate Department of Asian American Studies (IDAAS) was established in 1998 and currently has a core of thirteen faculty who teach and research in Asian American Studies. At the heart of its program, IDAAS offers an array of classes each academic year that addresses Asian Pacific American issues and populations. The department’s curriculum in the humanities and social sciences includes courses in the arts, ethnic studies, history, literature, psychology, sociology, and a number of interdisciplinary areas of study. For more information about the department, please visit the IDAAS website at http://www.idaas.org.