I am an interdisciplinary historian who thinks about the relationship between race and empire. I engage in the fields of diplomatic history, Asian American Studies, and Critical SWANA Studies, and more specifically, Iranian Diaspora Studies.
Publications:
“Post-Revolutionary Iranians in the Philippines: Toward Decentering the United States in Asian/American Studies,” American Quarterly 77: 4 (2025), (forthcoming).
“After the Battle of Beverly Hills: U.S. Government Surveillance of Iranian International Students in the Cold War,” Diplomatic History 48:2 (...
At its core, my research program takes cultural studies approaches to theorize and narrate the interface between race, culture, knowledge, and state power. My work explores race as a “master category” (following Omi and Winant) and as a “medium” (following WJT Mitchell) by crafting comparative, relational, intersectional, and transnational analyses situated in localized and embodied contexts. By turning to the domain of culture, I investigate how power differentials become sedimented and contested in narrative, subject and identity formations, memory, and knowledge production.
I received my PhD in Anthropology, and most of my research has been conducted on Rosebud Reservation, South Dakota, home of the Sicangu Lakota or Rosebud Sioux. In February 2023, I began collaborative research on the Hoopa Valley Tribe in northern California, which has been in a 7 decade struggle to address the loss of fish in the Trinity River whose water has been diverted to irrigate farms in the Central Valley.
PhD, Anthropology, Columbia University, 1987 BA, Anthropology, Hofstra University, 1975
I am an art historian specializing in contemporary transnational art and visual culture in the Arab/Muslim world with an interdisciplinary research on racial discourse, transnational gender politics, militarism, oil cultures and extractive economies in West Asia.
Degree/Education: UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow, Feminist Studies, University of California, Santa Cruz Ph.D., Art History, University of California, San Diego M.A., Art History, University of British Columbia, Vancouver B.F.A., Fine Arts, Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design Programs:...
I mostly study people who during the 1960s raised hell because they wanted to stop a war, or fight racial injustice, or overthrow patriarchy. Inspired by these activists, my research and teaching reflect my desire to harness what I consider the subversive potential of history to prompt new ways of thinking among academics and members of the public alike.
Programs:Asian American and Asian Diaspora Studies, Chinese Diaspora, Cultural Citizenship, Cultural Politics of Food, Diaspora / Transnationalism; Asians in the Americas, Ethnography Degree:
PhD, Anthropology, Stanford University, 2000 MA, Anthropology, Stanford University 1995 BA, Anthropology, minor in Ethnic Studies, University of California, Berkeley, 1993
