Current SEAA Board Members

Hyang Jin Jung is Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Seoul National University, South Korea. She received her Ph.D. in 2001 in cultural anthropology from the University of Minnesota, U.S.A. Her research interests lie in the intersection among culture, self, and emotion, with U.S. and the two Koreas as her primary anthropological sites. Her ongoing research projects include the psychocultural underpinnings of the North Korean statehood and society, education and cultural psychology in South Korea, and the emotional culture of the postmodern American society. She is author of Learning to Be an Individual: Emotion and Person in an American Junior High School (Peter Lang, 2007).

Sara L. Friedman is Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies and Adjunct Professor of East Asian Languages and Literatures at Indiana University. Her research sits at the intersections of political, legal, and feminist anthropology, with a focus on Taiwan, China, and intra-Asian migrations. Her scholarship has examined topics such as the politics of marriage and marriage migrations, LGBTQ family formation and rights activism, state power and citizenship, and alternative ethics of kinship and parenting. She is currently researching the role of legal recognition in the lives of LGBTQ-parent families in Taiwan and China, and quests for the “good life” among Chinese middle-class families who migrate from cities to the countryside. Her major publications include Exceptional States: Chinese Immigrants and Taiwanese Sovereignty (California, 2015) and Intimate Politics: Marriage, the Market, and State Power in Southeastern China (Harvard, 2006). She is co-editor of the special issue Productive Encounters: Kinship, Gender, and Family Laws in East Asia (positions, 2021, with Seung-kyung Kim) and the edited volumes, Migrant Encounters: Intimate Labor, the State, and Mobility across Asia (Pennsylvania, 2015, with Pardis Mahdavi) and Wives, Husbands, and Lovers: Marriage and Sexuality in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Urban China (Stanford, 2014, with Deborah Davis). Her recent articles have appeared in LGBTQ+ Family, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Law & Social Inquiry, and positions: asia critique.

Christine YANO (University of Hawai’i at Manoa)
President 2024, 2025, Incoming President 2022, 2023, cryano[ at]hawaii.edu

Christine R. Yano, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Hawai`i, has conducted research on Japan and Japanese Americans with a focus on popular culture. In 2020-2021 she served as the President of the Association for Asian Studies. She has served as Chair of the American Advisory Committee to Japan Foundation since 2018. Her publications include Tears of Longing: Nostalgia and the Nation in Japanese Popular Song (Harvard, 2002), Airborne Dreams: “Nisei” Stewardesses and Pan American World Airways (Duke, 2011), and Pink Globalization: Hello Kitty and its Trek Across the Pacific (Duke, 2013). Her latest book is Straight A’s: Asian American College Students in Their Own Words with Neal Akatsuka (Duke, 2018).

Ed Pulford is Senior Lecturer (=Associate Professor) in Chinese Studies at the University of Manchester, UK. His research focuses on experiences of socialism and empire in borderland and minority regions between China, Russia and Korea, and particularly on cross-border understandings of time and friendship. His most recent project looks at communities of ‘Chinese’ minorities who also have populations in neighbouring countries, and how the ‘global China’ era is reshaping ideas of ethnicity, race and diversity. He is the author of two books – Past Progress: Time and Politics at the Borders of China, Russia and Korea (Stanford UP 2024) and Mirrorlands: Russia, China and Journeys in Between (Hurst/Oxford UP 2019) – and articles in Anthropological Quarterly, History and Anthropology, Comparative Studies in Society and History and elsewhere.

[bio Sketch forthcoming].

Isaac Gagné is Principal Researcher at the German Institute for Japanese Studies and Managing Editor of the peer-reviewed journal Contemporary Japan. He received his PhD in Cultural Anthropology from Yale University and has worked at the Waseda University Institute of Asia-Pacific Studies, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, and The University of Hong Kong. His research focuses on four broad fields of inquiry: 1) Gender, sexuality, and popular culture; 2) Religion, morality, and ethics; 3) Mental health, psychotherapy, and well-being; 4) Globalization and migration. His recent publications include: “Mapping the local economy of care: Social welfare and volunteerism in local communities,” in Sonja Ganseforth & Hanno Jentzsch (eds.), Rethinking Locality in Japan (Routledge, 2021), “Dislocation, Social Isolation, and the Politics of Recovery in Post-Disaster Japan” (Transcultural Psychiatry, 2020), “Religious Globalization and Reflexive Secularization in a Japanese New Religion” (Japan Review, 2017), and Japan through the lens of the Tokyo Olympics (co-edited with Barbara Holthus, Wolfram Manzenreiter, and Franz Waldenberger; Routledge, 2020).

Nan Kim is Associate Professor of History and Affiliated Professor of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Her work has largely explored contemporary histories of dissent, delving into emergent phenomena and historical disputes that stem from the conditions of unended war in divided Korea. Her recent work – including a chapter in Forces of Nature: New Perspectives on Korean Environments (Cornell, 2023) – further engages with questions concerning political ecology, intractable toxicity, intergenerational ethics, and the nuclear Anthropocene. She serves on the editorial board of Critical Asian Studies, and she is the author of Memory, Reconciliation, and Reunions in South Korea: Crossing the Divide (Lexington Books, 2017), which won the Peace History Society’s first-book prize.

Councilor
Lynne NAKANO (Chinese University of Hong Kong)
Councilor 2025-26-27, lynnenakano[at ] cuhkdot edu.hk

Lynne Y Nakano is professor and Chair in the Department of Japanese Studies and Co-Director of the Gender Research Centre at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. She has researched volunteerism, special education, disability, singlehood and family in Japan, and is interested in comparative research of Japan, Hong Kong, and China. She is author of Community Volunteers in Japan: Everyday Stories of Social Change (Routledge 2004), and Making Our Own Destiny: Single Women, Family, and Opportunity in Shanghai, Hong Kong and Tokyo (University of Hawaii Press 2022).

Lihong Shi is associate professor in the Department of Anthropology and director of the Asian Studies program at Case Western Reserve University. She studies the impact of state governance (China’s one-child policy in particular) and sociocultural transformations on family relations and individual experiences in China. Her book Choosing Daughters: Family Change in Rural China (Stanford University Press, 2017) studies the reproductive choice of having only one daughter among rural Chinese parents and reveals the transformations occurring within the Chinese families. Her current research explores the experience of grief among Chinese parents who lost their only child born under the one-child policy.

Councilor
Huatse GAL (details to come)
Councilor 2026-27-28, hg57@ricedote du

Dr. Huatse Gyal is a filmmaker and an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Rice University. Dr. Gyal’s research explores the interdependent relationships between land, language, and community, focusing on state environmentalism and climate change, as well as an interdisciplinary approach to Indigenous environmental movements in eastern Tibet. He has published peer-reviewed articles in international journals, including Critical Asian Studies, Nomadic Peoples, and Ateliers d’anthropologie. Dr. Gyal is the co-editor of the first English volume titled Resettlement among Tibetan Nomads in China (2015) and recently co-edited a special issue called Translating Across the Bardo: Centering the Richness of Tibetan Language in Tibetan Studies (2024). In 2023, he released his first feature-length documentary film titled Khata: Poison or Purity? Dr. Gyal is enthusiastic about multimodal forms of knowledge production and looks forward to collaborating with students and colleagues who share this passion.

Councilor
Gavin WHITELAW (Harvard University)
Councilor 2026-27-28, whitelaw[at] fas.harvarddotedu

[bio Sketch forthcoming].

David Tsoi is DPhil student at the School of Geography and the Environment,
University of Oxford. His current research focuses on the entanglement between
housing, politics, migration, and formation of class in Hong Kong and the UK. He is
interested in how the transnational flow of capital has reconfigured the formation of class. His previous work revolves around informal economy of sex work, and the
increasing overlap between the intimate life and the market among middle-class queer communities in Hong Kong. He has conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Hong Kong, Korea, and Peru. His work has appeared in Sexualities, and Men and Masculinities.

Shoko Yamada is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies, Princeton University. Her work explores social and ethical life in the aftermath of environmental injury, drawing on long-term ethnographic engagements across a river basin in north central Japan. She completed her Ph.D. in the Department of Anthropology and the School of the Environment at Yale University in 2025.

Yanping NI, January 2025
yn4683[at ]princeton dotedu

Yanping Ni (she/her) is a PhD candidate in Anthropology at Princeton University. She writes about care, gender, labor, media, the environment, and experimental pedagogy. Her work has appeared in peer-reviewed journals such as China Information, Asian Bioethics Review, and Feminist Review, as well as in public-facing forums like Anthropology News and Tying Knots. Her dissertation delves into the intricate dynamics of economic “involution” (内卷, neijuan) within China’s new energy vehicle (NEV) sector, examining the environmental awareness and material innovation among industry frontrunners. She seeks to understand how the energy question comes into play in geopolitical rivalries–or the other way round, and what ethnographic research in a pioneering industry can teach us about China’s global ambitions.

Alex WOLFF, January 2025
alex_wolff[at ]brown dotedu

Alex Wolff (She/They) is the Louise Lamphere Visiting Assistant Professor in Anthropology and Gender & Sexuality Studies at Brown University. Her current book project entitled Queer Dependencies: Economies of Kinship, Reproduction, and Politics in South Korea explores how queer and trans identifying Koreans create life and politics vis-à-vis increasing labor insecurity, demographic transformations, and economic dependence with kin. By illuminating the intimate interdependencies among economics, kinship, state power, and queer politics, this project works to expand existing analyses of precarity, reproduction, and demographic change in anthropology and gender and sexuality studies.