Grad Student - AARC

Amanda Su

English, UC Berkeley

James Sun

Ethnic Studies, UC Berkeley

James Sun is a Ph.D. student in Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley focusing on Asian American environmental history. They are currently researching the history of Asian rice in the U.S., including how rice came to the U.S., the communities and inter-ethnic relations that formed around growing, cooking, and eating rice, and the environmental impact of growing rice in the U.S. James formerly taught on a Fulbright Fellowship in South Korea, worked at an environmental nonprofit focused on industrial decarbonization, and graduated from Yale with a degree in Statistics and a degree in...

Nathan Tilton

Anthropology, UC Berkeley

Nathan Anthony Tilton, MA, uses he/him pronouns. His disability pronouns are: service dog handler, chair user, neurodivergent, and disabled veteran. He is the Associate Director at UC Berkeley's Disability Lab and a PhD student in Cultural Anthropology. His research interests encompass disability anthropology, veteran health, critical disability studies, post colonial studies, crip time, and military biopolitics. Nate's research examines the ways in which institutions disable people, focusing on disabled veterans on Guam and the afterlives of former U.S. military bases in the Philippines....

Alex Torrez

Sociology, UC Berkeley

Alex K. Torrez (They/Them) is a Chancellor’s Fellow at UC Berkeley. They are broadly interested in questions at the nexus of Identity Classifications such as race, gender, and sexuality, Medical Sociology, Science and Technology Studies, and Organizations. Currently, these interests have led Alex to explore understandings of care in clinical settings, genomics, and the development of recruitment strategies for scientific study and organ donation.

Derek Wu

Ethnic Studies, UC Berkeley

Derek Wu is a PhD candidate in the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley (Designated Emphasis in Global Metropolitan Studies) broadly exploring the effects of race and class inequalities on democracy in cities. His dissertation project uses archival work and more than 75 ethnographic interviews spanning five languages to explore how community organizing practices changed after the 1960s in an extremely diverse neighborhood of Oakland, CA, known as the Murder Dubs. He compares types of civil society organizations (such as churches and neighborhood councils) and...

Victor Xie

Ethnic Studies, UC Berkeley

Victor Xie (he/him) is a PhD student in Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley and a recipient of the Chancellor’s Fellowship. He was born and raised in the Bay Area and received his B.A. in English and Asian American Studies at UCLA. His research is centered around how Chinese diasporic subjects in the US have used discourses of American freedom and democracy to gain legibility from the state, and how this entanglement has consequences for other racialized bodies living within and outside of US empire. He is particularly interested in political asylum, Cold War afterlives, and labor histories....

Chun-Chi Yang

School of Education, UC Berkeley

Chun-Chi (Sarah) Yang is a student in the School Psychology PhD Program in Berkeley School of Education. Before graduate school, she was a high school teacher in Taiwan for 20 years. After resigning from her teacher position, she attended the Post-Baccalaureate Program in Psychology Department at UC Berkeley. She then worked as a project coordinator in Hinshaw Lab and Family and Culture Lab at UC Berkeley. Currently, she is a second-year PhD student focused on adolescent research. As a teacher, she observed an upward trend of sleep problems and mental health difficulties in adolescents,...

Alan Yeh

French, UC Berkeley

Alan Yeh is a Ph.D. candidate in French at the University of California, Berkeley, where he studies refugitude aesthetics, memory, care, and food in 20th- and 21st-century French and Francophone literature, especially of the Vietnamese diaspora. His research has appeared in L’Esprit Créateur and has been supported by fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies and Mellon Foundation as well as Berkeley’s Center for Southeast Asian Studies. His dissertation uncovers transdiasporic approaches to a politics of care in displacement narratives entangled in histories of colonialism...

Vo Ram Yoon

Education, UC Berkeley

Vo Ram Yoon (him/his) is a doctoral student in the Policy, Politics, and Leadership cluster at the Berkeley School of Education (BSE). Ethnically Korean and raised in Bolivia, his passion for advancing social justice and equity in education have been shaped by his international upbringing and witnessing how privilege and marginalization manifest in education from the classrooms of Chicago Public Schools to the private English academies in Tokyo. His research interests include the racialization of AAPI students and the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality in organizations.

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Jaclyn Zhou

Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies, UC Berkeley

Jaclyn Zhou is a PhD candidate in the department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies and the Berkeley Center for New Media. Her research interests include fan studies, Asian and Asian American popular culture, digital technology and embodiment, tourism studies, and race and empire. Her dissertation explores the relationship between anime-inspired tourism and national and racial identity construction in the Japanese and global anime fandom. She is also a founding member of the Media Education Research Lab (MERL), a UC Berkeley-based lab developing methods for measuring and...