About me:
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I study diasporic groups in the United States, East Asia, and Southeast Asia. I examine how these distributed communities of migrants and their offspring reproduce and transmit their knowledges, technologies, professional networks, social solidarities, and communal cultural practices across time and space, from one generation to the next. My research includes the analysis of gendered narratives among knowledge communities through an array of sources: personal archives, professional groups, cultural heritage organizations, food practices in the home and at restaurants, and the aesthetics of production through handicrafts and the flexible manufacturing of technical devices and medical equipment. I collect oral histories and conduct archival research and ethnographic fieldwork.
In addition to my written scholarship, I am the writer and director of several documentary films, including the award-winning Homecoming about my family's histories in Malaysia and America. My films have screened locally, nationally, and internationally at film festivals, academic conferences, art galleries, public libraries, and on television. I have received numerous fellowships, grants, and awards from organizations and institutions such as the American Library Association (ALA), University of |
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California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Institute for American Cultures, and American Anthropology Association and given over fifty invited presentations internationally. I have contributed to books, journals, and encyclopedias in the areas of Asian American studies, archival science, and gender studies.
Currently, I am involved in a series of inter-related research projects, including a digital humanities infrastructure-building project with colleagues who are anthropologists, historians, and a special subject librarian. We are developing an online platform for collecting, preserving, accessing, and interpreting oral life history interviews gathered through ethnographic social science research. I am also pursuing a book project that emerged from my dissertation research. I am a postdoctoral researcher at UCLA and a Research Data Alliance (RDA) Data Share Fellow. I also hold a position as the project archivist for faculty papers in gender studies. |
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I have over fifteen years teaching experience in higher education. I was a lecturer in the UCLA Department of Asian American Studies, where I taught classes in documentary filmmaking and video ethnography. Many of the works that the students produced in my classes have screened in film festivals and are shown in other Asian American studies courses at UCLA. In addition, the students from my classes have gone on to have successful careers in the entertainment industry as actors, screenwriters, comedians, and directors. While I was a graduate student, I was a teaching assistant in the Film Department at the UCLA School of Theater, Film, and Television.
I have a Ph.D. in information studies and M.F.A. in film from UCLA, and a B.A. in East Asian Studies from Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania.
