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About Me

I am a community-engaged historian who takes an intersectional and comparative approach to the study of Asian American movements. My areas of research and teaching include Asian American studies, 20th century U.S. and urban history, and women of color feminisms. I am an Assistant Professor of History at Swarthmore College.

My current research project, “Whose City? Our City! Asian American and Multiracial Movements against Police Violence in New York,” traces the development of these movements since the 1970s. Based on oral histories and newly recovered archival sources, this project examines cases including the 1995 police killing of Chinese teenager Yong Xin Huang in Brooklyn and the eviction of Vietnamese street vendors from Chinatown under the broken windows policing regime. I argue that policing was a form of state-sanctioned removal responding to the demographic transformation of the city as it became “majority minority,” thus movements against police violence not only demanded justice for individual cases of brutality but constituted a broader struggle over the spaces and future of New York.

I coordinate a public history project, awarded a grant from the Rackham Program in Public Scholarship, which documents over three decades of Asian American community organizing in New York. The project partners with the grassroots organization CAAAV Organizing Asian Communities (formerly known as the Committee Against Anti-Asian Violence), where I currently serve as a board member and formerly worked as a youth organizer. I am also a core working group member of A/P/A Voices: A COVID-19 Public Memory Project, which partners with the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU to record experiences of the pandemic through oral history and archival documentation. I received my A.B. in Ethnic Studies from Brown University and Ph.D. from the Department of American Culture at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Recent Publications

“From State-Sanctioned Removal to the Right to the City: The Policing of Asian Immigrants in Southern Brooklyn, 1987-1995,” Journal of Asian American Studies, February 2020.

“Constructing the Asian American and Latina/o Neighborhood,” Journal of Urban History, March 2020.

Media Coverage

Social Media

Country Focus

Expertise by Geography

United States

Expertise by Chronology

20th century, 21st century

Expertise by Topic

Gender, Local & Regional, Politics, Public History, Race, Rebellion & Revolution, Urban History, Women