AADS Fall 2025 Symposium

Madeline Y. Hsu teaches history and Asian American Studies at the University of Maryland where she is director of the Center for Global Migration Studies. Her award-winning books include Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of Home: Transnationalism and Migration between the United States and South China, 1882-1943 (2000) and The Good Immigrants: How the Yellow Peril Became the Model Minority (2015). In 2016, she published Asian American History: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2016). She co-edited A Nation of Immigrants Reconsidered: U.S. Society in an Age of Restriction, 1924-1965 (2019) and Vol. II of the Cambridge History of Global Migrations (2023). Please visit her K-12 curriculum project Teach Immigration History produced in collaboration with the Immigration and Ethnic History Society. She is currently researching immigration and citizenship regulation in decolonizing Singapore and Malaysia.

Mae M. Ngai is Lung Family Professor of Asian American Studies and Professor of History. She received her PhD from Columbia in 1998 and taught at the University of Chicago before returning to Columbia in 2007. She is author of the award-winning Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (2004); The Lucky Ones: One Family and the Extraordinary Invention of Chinese America (2010); and The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and Global Politics(2021), winner of the Bancroft Prize; and is co-editor of Corky Lee’s Asian America: Fifty Years of Photographic Justice (2024). She is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a Radcliffe Fellow, and a Kluge Chair at the Library of Congress, and also has received fellowships from the Institute for Advanced Study, the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the NY Public Library, the Russell Sage Foundation, and the Institute for Ideas and Imagination, among others. Ngai has written on immigration history and policy for the Washington Post, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, the Atlantic, and the Nation. Before becoming a historian she was a labor-union organizer and educator in New York City. She is now writing Nation of Immigrants: A Short History of an Idea, based on the Lawrence Stone Lectures at Princeton. 

Pawan Dhingra is the Chief Equity and Inclusion Officer, Aliki Perroti and Seth Frank ’55 Professor of U.S. Immigration Studies, and Chair of the Asian American and Pacific Islander Studies Program at Amherst College. His award-winning monographs include Hyper Education: Why Good Schools, Good Grades, and Good Behavior Are Not Enough (2020), Life Behind the Lobby: Indian American Motel Owners and the American Dream (2012), and Managing Multicultural Lives: Asian American Professionals and the Challenge of Multiple Identities (2007). He is co-author of Asian America: Sociological and Interdisciplinary Perspectives (2014 and 2021), and co-editor of Disciplinary Futures: Sociology in Conversation with American, Ethnic, and Indigenous Studies ( 2023). He is the immediate past president of the Association for Asian American Studies.

Calvin Cheung-Miaw is the Cordelia and William Laverack Assistant Professor of History at Duke University. His writings have appeared in the Journal of American History, Pacific Historical Review, Convergence Magazine, and other places. He is currently working on a book about the intellectual history of Asian American Studies.

Eileen Cheng-yin Chow is Associate Professor of the Practice in Chinese and Japanese Cultural Studies at Duke University, and one of the founding directors of Story Lab at Duke. She is Director of Graduate Studies for Duke Asian Pacific Studies Institute, as well as its interim director of APSI for 2025-26. She is also a founding/core faculty member of Duke Asian American and Diaspora Studies. Elsewhere, Eileen is Director of the Cheng Shewo Institute of Chinese Journalism at Shih Hsin University in Taipei, Taiwan, and she co-directs the Biographical Literature Press and its longstanding Chinese-language history journal, Biographical Literature. Eileen serves on the executive board of the LA Review of Books, and as co-editor of the Duke University Press book series, Sinotheory. Among Eileen’s ongoing projects this year is a collaboration with Duke AADS colleague Jingqiu Guan, serving as dramaturg for Guan's multimedia dance project on rail travel and the Asian diaspora; and also, with Mae Ngai (Columbia), co-editing the unpublished writings of pioneer Asian American author Louis Chu.

Nayoung Aimee Kwon is an award-winning multilingual author and a professor in the Department of Asian & Middle Eastern Studies and the Department of Art, Art History, and Visual Studies at Duke University. She is the Founding Director of Duke’s Asian American & Diaspora Studies Program and co-directs a service-learning program on the legacies of partitioned Koreas, with a focus on documentary arts, based in Durham, Seoul, and Jeju. Her publications include Intimate Empire, Theorizing Colonial Cinema, and Antinomies of the Colonial Archive. Her current research examines forgotten entanglements of imperial legacies in and beyond the so-called cold war across post-1945 Asia and America.

Anna Storti is Assistant Professor of Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies at Duke University where she also teaches in the Asian American and Diaspora Studies Program. Her first book, Torn: Asian/white Life and the Intimacy of Violence is forthcoming with Duke University Press. She is currently at work at another project that spotlights the practice and cultures of vice. Her research has been supported by the McNair Scholars Program, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Institute for Citizens and Scholars. Her scholarship has been published in Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, Feminist Studies, Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas, and differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies,among other venues, and her poetry can be found in Sinister Wisdom: A Multicultural Lesbian Literary and Art Journal.