My research examines the lives of men who migrate from the Indian countryside to Delhi to operate cycle rickshaws for work. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in North India, I describe the men’s labor practices as well as their lives outside of work, particularly their family relationships and communal/caste roles. Across these spheres, multiple masculine ideals — sometimes conflicting, sometimes complimentary — shape and constrain their behavior. Their labor activity is premised on a masculine expectation of breadwinning, but it is also influenced by their beliefs about the male body and by their intimate relationships with different types of women. Furthermore, on the labor migration circuit cycle rickshaw men practice a masculine ideal of supporting other male migrants from their village, and doing so can require bending or subverting caste rules. This research, which I am currently developing into a book manuscript, shows how the Dalit workers cannot be understood except by simultaneously appreciating them as masculine actors. It also provides for the field of South Asian labor studies a humanistic portrait of low-paid manual workers that demonstrates how their experiences are not circumscribed by their jobs.

Leech Trouble: Therapeutic Entanglements in Human-Leech Medicine is a study of leech therapy as represented in early South Asian medical texts and a comparative ethnography of human-leech interactions in ayurvedic medicine and contemporary biomedicine. Engaging historical, philological, and ethnographic research, this project has two major components. The first is a history of leech therapy in first-millennium South Asia that draws upon textual and epigraphical sources. The portrayal of leeches and human-leech interactions in these sources reveal a range of shifting attitudes about physicians’ gendered sensory expertise, the nature of leeches, and what constitutes a medical technology. Building upon this historical and philological study, the second portion of the study compares leech-human interactions in contemporary ayurvedic clinical practice and in biomedical practice. Broadly, this study asks: How does ayurvedic leech therapy as presented in early texts and practiced in contemporary clinics challenge what we understand about how physicians sense, know, and treat patients? In what ways does human interaction with leeches as agentive participants in leech therapy broaden our notion of what constitutes a medical actor or technology? How do engagements with leeches compare across contemporary ayurvedic practice in Kerala and biomedical practice in the United States? In what ways are constructions of gender, humanness, and animality reflected in representations of human-leech interactions? This study brings human-leech medicine into dialogue with medical anthropological and feminist science studies scholarship on more-than-human worlds and the ecologies of care that they entail.

Religious building is a form of world-making, and as such, acts of Buddhist material and spatial production in northern Thailand play a significant role in the religious, social, and geographic conceptions of northern Thai Buddhists. My project’s focus on Buddhist temple building in and around Chiang Rai, Thailand shows how religious building and crafting affords people opportunities to define and reify their communities of care, attend to various forces embedded in the land, negotiate with and appease political power, and construct identity. Religious building provides many of the social, ritual, and aesthetic processes through which Buddhism in northern Thailand is actively lived. Through engaging in acts of Buddhist spatial production, northern Thai Buddhists are able to define, articulate, and perform answers to ethical and teleological questions, such as “what is the good life?” “What is the basis of a prosperous community?” “What do good Buddhists do?” and, maybe most importantly “Why was I (re)born?”

This study examines the effects of the construction of a military base on local communities on Jeju Island, South Korea. The South Korean military’s intent in building these facilities is to demonstrate military sovereignty to neighboring countries while also providing socio-economic benefits to the local population (Korean Navy, Ministry of National Defense of Korea). However, local communities and NGOs continue to resist contemporary military construction policies due to the ecological, social and economic impacts of this process, which are exacerbated by the government’s unilateral approach and its failure to implement a system where the surrounding localities can influence construction policies (Sze et al., 2009). While resistance to military facilities is widely documented, this research highlights the conflict between the military and local communities as the disconnect within the different political scales between those who are empowered and the average local citizen in the community so that the actual local people’s voice is marginalized and overheard. This study focuses on the local people’s experience with the theoretical frame of environmental justice, the concept of scale and political ecology by using phenomenology to analyze open-ended interview data. This research concluded that 1) the local people were made voiceless and invisible through marginalization by the government; 2) this case is an environmental injustice case by identifying how the current process marginalizes local communities and environmental impacts through the analytical frames of environmental justice and the concept of scale; and 3) the combination of environmental justice theory and the concept of scale from political ecology is a more effective application of this study and can contribute to future related studies.

My research is about the non-singular and lucrative power of K-Beauty and its international allure: from its ubiquitous call for translucent, BTS-like skin to its cutting-edge surgical enhancement procedures developed in South Korea, and now available across nations such as China and Hong Kong. Upon delving deeper into Korea’s socioeconomic and political history, connections emerge between South Korean modernization and the US occupation, an emergent South Korean cosmetics industry, and the export-driven military dictatorship of 1961-79 led by Park Chung Hee. These connections show us that K-Beauty is not just a trend, but a significant historical phenomenon.

In both projects, I study the development of Islamic society in South Asia during the tenth and thirteenth centuries. In my first project, Early Islamic Ghur, I examine processes of Islamicization in the Ghur region of northwest-central Afghanistan. This project begins from the inception of Muslim conquest of Ghur in the ninth-to-tenth century, and analyzes the region’s shift to Islam through analysis of how local ruling families were integrated into orbits of Islamic power in the eastern Islamic lands. The second project, An Anthology of Asnad-i Ghur, centers on producing an illustrated bilingual anthology in Persian and English of a newly discovered set of medieval documents absent from extant scholarship. Currently housed in the National Archives of Afghanistan, the collection consists of land deeds, taxation receipts, personal letters, and a variety of other legal and business records. They contain firsthand information about the everyday lives of Muslim and non-Muslim individuals and families, including Jews and Hindus. Situated at the intersection of South Asia and Iranian studies, both projects contribute to debates concerning patterns of early Islamic conquest, community formation, social relations across religious groups, and the consolidation of political authority and sovereignty in the countryside. Across both projects, I prioritize original and largely overlooked and unpublished language materials to understand major transformations in state and society of a bygone era.

The classical dance genre in Cambodia is a multivalent cultural practice—part ritual, part diplomatic tool, part national symbol, part commodity. This project examines the economic and social issues that dance performers face as they become the essence of what it means to be Khmer—issues that have only become more pronounced during the COVID pandemic. Based on a longitudinal ethnographic study that expands upon Loic Waquant’s (2004) concept of corporeal economy, it examines the life and work experiences of Cambodian classical dancers over a 10-year period to explore how their bodies become value-laden commodities within a global economic structure. The AAS Pipeline fellowship provides support for additional research to provide insight into the dancer’s experiences of training, performance, and daily live at this point in the COVID pandemic as well as support for manuscript development.  The book will focus on the connections between the bodily experiences of artists and social and economic factors such as, tourism, work with NGOS, national policy, and relations with other Southeast Asian nations. The central problem addressed is: How do dancers navigate through uncertain economic terrain when the body is the source of income, the source of innovation, and the source of creativity?

This project will continue and expand an ongoing digital humanities project that encompasses data collection, database creation, and visualizations of academic-oriented job advertisements in East Asian Studies from around the globe (http://prcurtis.com/projects/jobdata/). Begun in 2019, this project assesses the state of the job market in East Asian Studies, providing a weekly-updated table of recent job announcements and an annual summation of major trends accompanied by interactive charts and maps. Although this type of data collection is critical to the future of the East Asian Studies field and benefits job seekers who must regularly search some dozen different websites for recent advertisements, no similar project coordinating and centralizing this information. In making this data available, it will serve as a foundation for current and future faculty to argue for our field’s needs, identify strategic forms of support that can diversify specialist subject matter as well as where it is offered, and make the job search process more accessible to disadvantaged candidates. This public-facing data is ultimately part of a more equitable Asian Studies.

My project, “Mapping The Tales of the Heike,” will visualize and analyze the geographic characteristics of the different variants of The Tale of the Heike. The project combines DH methodologies of GIS mapping, text-mining, and corpus analysis to open opportunities for spatial analysis of premodern Japanese literature that is comprehensive in scope, while paying attention to the complexities of historical and literary contexts. Previous research has highlighted different spatial practices between variants through close comparison of certain passages and sections in the variants, but The Tale of the Heike’s considerable length raises difficulties for examining the full text of each variant. Fortunately, digital humanities provide means for reexamining the spatiality of the Tale of the Heike from broad, interdisciplinary perspectives. Visualizing places in the Heike can help researchers and students think about the regional diversity of Japanese literature and discover new areas of the texts (and regions of Japan) that deserve more scholarly attention. By making the map and its underlying data into an online resource, the project seeks to contribute to scholarship and teaching on The Tale of the Heike, the spatiality of medieval Japan, and digital humanities in Japanese studies.

To commemorate the upcoming 50th anniversary of the Fall of Saigon and the Reunification of Vietnam, artist/scholar Julian Saporiti will write and record a new album through his musical project No-No Boy examines Vietnam before, during and after the war from both sides of the conflict. This fellowship will provide resources for Saporiti to travel to Vietnam to conduct research and record field recordings which will later be woven into the songwriting and production of this “Vietnam” album.

This album will focus on the small stories and on-the-ground experiences which illustrate the vast dynamic range of lived experiences of Vietnamese and Vietnamese diasporic community members.

The COVID-19 pandemic has shifted how museums and educators engage with their audiences, especially as global attention turned toward virtual learning and experiences. It has also underscored the importance of digital educational resources and the need for greater representation of Indigenous culture and minoritized voices. The purpose of this Public Research Project is to develop high-quality humanities resources about cultural diversity in China using the material culture of a rural Chinese folk house. After surveying, cataloging, documenting, and researching the contents of an emerging historic house museum, I will curate and produce an exhibition that conveys the richness of Chinese rural traditions, beliefs, and experiences. With the support of this fellowship, this exhibition will serve as a critical resource for K-12 educators and students by providing context for a variety of material culture objects from rural China, from farming equipment to sacred artifacts.

In April 2020, HMoob (Hmong) leaders from La Crosse, Wisconsin nonprofit, Cia Siab, Inc. (CS), and Asian American graduate and undergraduate students from the University of Michigan (UM) and University of Wisconsin-La Crosse (UW-L) convened to launch a collaborative, community-led, multi state, multi-institutional interdisciplinary public research effort, the Anti-HMoob Violence Project (AHVP) under the leadership of HMoob womxn, AHVP aims to document anti-HMoob violence in California, Minnesota, and Wisconsin from 1975 to 2019 by examining newspaper articles.

The AHVP has three deliverables: 1) an English and HMoob white paper; 2) A digital map that visualizes anti-HMoob violence incidents; and 3) A plan of action for development of CS’s own open access institutional repository (IR) in order to prepare AHVP’s data and future goal future research data for storage, reuse, and discoverability. CS and AHVP will use deliverables to (goals): 1) inform anti-HMoob violence prevention, intervention, & education; 2) expand stakeholdership in advancing the wellbeing of HMoob communities, particularly in Wisconsin; 3) strengthen connections with organizational partners; 4) secure digital funding for anti violence work; and 5) ensure that data about the community stays within the community and is owned by the community.

Thus far the research team has collected over 6,000 news articles reviewed and coded them, and prepared the coded data for analysis. The research team has also conducted six oral history interviews with La Crosse HMoob community members.

North Carolina is home to some of the fastest growing communities of Southeast Asians in the United States. Couched in this local context, Southeast Asian North Carolina aims to create a syllabus focusing on the unique experiences of Southeast Asians in the state. The work will center on oral histories from five local communities, including Hmong (Morganton), Cambodian (Greensboro), Burmese and Karen (Carrboro), Filipinx (Raleigh), and the pan-Southeast Asia activist community (Charlotte), which will be collected and archived during the grant period. These firsthand accounts will be complemented by academic texts, literature, news reports, and other media. The project will explore how the histories of individuals from across Southeast Asia have integrated with, been subsumed by, and even imposed on the personal experiences of North Carolinians whose ancestors came to reside in the state in a diversity of ways, including indigenous peoples, enslaved people, and colonizers, as well as other communities of refugees and immigrants. Students will be encouraged to think expansively about how they and others understand the history of the US Southeast as a global history and how that has led both to conflicts and to solidarity networks in the US and Southeast Asia as well as internationally.

This course examines how the exclusion of Chinatown, as a racialized space, from the nation is precisely what makes it an exemplary American space. That is, one needs not look further than Chinatown to understand how race, class, and sexual boundaries are negotiated in the American city. The course will explore other interdisciplinary directions that bridge Asian and Asian American Studies in order to understand Chinatown as a product of global capitalist modernity, uneven development, racial capitalism, and US imperialism. For instance, how does Chinatown mirror the experiences of modernity of postcolonial urban spaces elsewhere? More than a site of racial violence, how has Chinatown functioned as a sanctuary for the marginalized? How has Chinatown shaped the Asian American political imagination? That is, the history of Chinatown has been central to the founding of Asian American Studies and the field’s interest in Maoist China. How might our narratives of Chinatown mediate our narratives of US-China relations?

The goal of this project is to build a website that will serve as a resource for instructors teaching Japanese language at less-resource rich institutions. During the grant award period, five teaching modules will be created that address critical, historical, and social issues related to DEI that are not commonly included in language textbooks. The themes will be tied specifically to issues of race, gender, minority experiences, national identity, and migration–themes that are relevant to many students in the U.S. classroom. The website will potentially serve as a platform for additional modules whose list will be replenished.

Another aspect of the project’s aim is to gather information on the conditions and practices that obstruct implementation of diversity, equity, and inclusion in the Japanese language classroom. It will attempt to address the specific needs of instructors at less-resource rich institutions. Easily implementable modules that can be refashioned according to on the instructor’s pedagogical aims will hopefully foster brief but memorable explorations of critical subjects. The project will also explore methods of assessment that maintain educational integrity without reinforcing systemic inequities that educators are attempting to alleviate.

The Silk Roads as a topic is an opportunity to rethink the world beyond borders and fixed trajectories. Emphasis on change and hybridity has never been more important. Since I began teaching this course in 2019, I utilized this course to offer an alternative to the conventional survey “world history” courses. At the same time, I also avoid reiterating Baron von Richtofen’s 1877 der Seidenstraße or regurgitating the past assumption that “China” and “Rome” or “East” and “West” sought out one another in some ancient quest for pre-globalization. Histories of the Silk Roads also necessitate the less savory aspects of these exchanges that were equally impactful such as Han Wudi’s military conquests in search of the fabled heavenly horses or the 13th century spread of the bubonic plague. What I would like for students to take away from my class is that our histories are never certain and the accidents of exchange can be highly consequential. I hope to provide a far richer and more engaging approach to appreciating the many stories and histories through the AAS DEI curriculum grant through engaging activities such as visiting the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco and experiencing a live folk music performance.

This project redevelops the Asian Studies curriculum at Kennesaw State University (KSU) to specifically address multiple arenas of diversity in global Asian cultures. This is in response to the increasingly diverse KSU student body whose racial/ethnic/gender/class experiences represent the future of Asian Studies, both in the U.S. South and nationally. In this project we will design four new courses that help students understand how intersectional—racial, ethnic, gender, sexuality, class, and dis/ability—identities are experienced in Asia. We will also curate postgraduate opportunities, both abroad and in the Metro Atlanta region. The grant will culminate in Spring 2023 with an Intersections of Asian Studies and Gender/Sexuality Studies colloquium focused on undergraduate research projects.

This project redevelops the Asian Studies curriculum at Kennesaw State University (KSU) to specifically address multiple arenas of diversity in global Asian cultures. This is in response to the increasingly diverse KSU student body whose racial/ethnic/gender/class experiences represent the future of Asian Studies, both in the U.S. South and nationally. In this project we will design four new courses that help students understand how intersectional—racial, ethnic, gender, sexuality, class, and dis/ability—identities are experienced in Asia. We will also curate postgraduate opportunities, both abroad and in the Metro Atlanta region. The grant will culminate in Spring 2023 with an Intersections of Asian Studies and Gender/Sexuality Studies colloquium focused on undergraduate research projects.

The intention of this mentorship program is to enhance the professional development of black graduate students and postdoctoral scholars in the humanities, whose work focuses on the regions of South and/or Southeast Asia. It is also intended to create a network of support—both academic and non-academic—to provide balance, mentorship, community, and advocacy for the next generation of scholars.

The program will consist of a series of online workshops, over the course of 6 months (meeting once a month from September 2022 to February 2023) led by insightful mentors and facilitators. Based upon the needs of the cohort, the workshops will provide opportunity to discuss topics as varied as applying for travel, language and research grants; how to position oneself well for advancement in, and/or outside of, the academy; and ways to advocate for one’s own personal growth and health. The program will culminate in an in-person social event and discussion at the Association for Asian Studies annual meeting in Boston in March 2023. Funding will cover the costs of workshop resources for mentees, compensate mentors for their work and time, and provide for financial support (accommodation, travel and conference fees) for the mentees to attend the 2023 AAS meeting.

The Southeast Asia: Texts, Rituals, Performance (SEATRiP) program at the University of California, Riverside brings together faculty and students who share an ongoing interest in the arts and humanities and are engaged with the languages and expressive cultures of Southeast Asia and its diasporas. Our location in Southern California means that we serve historically underrepresented students from local Southeast Asian American communities in our graduate program. Because many of our students are first generation, they seek diverse faculty mentors who can help them navigate the institution and its systemic inequalities. We thus take seriously the need to rethink conventional models of mentorship as hierarchical and individualist in an effort to improve collective forms of support while preparing our students for post-graduate careers. Our proposed mentoring program, Demystifying Academia, builds on that vision to create a sustainable mentorship collective grounded in feminist and antiracist practices. It aims to make “the strange” more familiar and manageable through a series of workshops and discussions to propose new models of support in Southeast Asian Studies that foster more reciprocal and egalitarian mentoring relationships. 

“Teaching Southeast Asia: Communities, Borders, and Youth-Led Activism” will be a 4-week virtual seminar for higher education faculty and select graduate students limited to 15 participants. The seminar will be offered by the Center for Asian Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. This program will explore the evolving context of youth-led activists in Southeast Asia with a focus on Thailand, Myanmar, Cambodia, and Vietnam. It will foster deep and context-rich engagement with primary and secondary sources, with a particular focus on teaching strategies and knowledge sharing and co-creation by participants. The seminar will be designed to meet the needs of undergraduate educators addressing issues of anti-authoritarian and climate change activism at the intersections of ethnicity, class, religion, gender, power, and transnationalism.

This Fall 2022 one-day symposium at California State University, Fullerton (CSUF) consists of active engagement through curated roundtable discussions and moderated breakout sessions. “Teaching Southeast Asia at the Teaching University,” will facilitate discussion and pedagogical strategizing around innovative teaching methods and mentoring spaces for contingent faculty and future faculty, especially from non-traditional and underserved backgrounds. Focusing specifically on Southeast Asia – an underrepresented region at many universities – we bring together faculty across rank and teaching institutions, including the California State University (CSU) system and California Community Colleges (CCC) system to define what professional development means for us and how we can build community and space to thrive as teacher-scholars of Southeast Asia. Our proposed sessions include topics such as “Programming with no Program,” “Innovative Course Design in Southeast Asian Studies,” “Collaboration and Community,” and “Articulation Between Teaching Southeast Asian Studies in Anthropology with Ethnic and Asian American Studies.” These roundtable and breakout sessions serve two primary purposes. First, we aim to carve out time and supportive space for teacher-scholars to actively produce teaching materials with peer review and care. Second, we seek to foster cross-campus relationships and support systems through networking and generative discussion around the topics we care about most. If the status quo is that scholarship comes at the expense of teaching and vice versa, we question what scholarly and creative possibilities exist when granted the time to be with our community and generate teaching and scholarship in collective spaces. 

The purpose of this project, “Pedagogies in Asian Studies: Faculty Seminars on Teaching South and Southeast Asia,” would be to continue to build culturally responsive pedagogical practices through Asian Studies curricula. In particular, the proposed seminars will be points of discussion and practice for faculty participants to examine the regions of South and Southeast Asia through the lens of the diverse Asian American student population at CSULB, a designated Asian American, Native American Pacific Islander Serving Institution (AANAPISI). Specifically, I propose to convene two early-career scholars: Dr. Jolie Chea and Dr. Aditi Mukherjee. Dr. Chea is an Assistant Professor of Asian American Studies at UCLA and her research examines empire, Southeast Asia, and memory. Dr. Mukherjee is an Assistant Professor in History at GITAM University. Dr. Mukherjee’s research examines rupture and post-Partition mobilities of Bangladeshi refugees in India. Dr. Chea and Dr. Mukherjee’s work also speaks to my own research on Global Southeast Asias and transnational Cambodian diasporas. The culturally responsive pedagogical materials developed on South and Southeast Asia would better reflect the intersecting identities of students in order to create a learning environment that supports their academic success through courses in Asian Studies.