Current SEAA Board Members

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).

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).

Ellen Oxfeld has worked on a variety of topics in Chinese culture and society, including food, morality in reform era rural China, gender and family relations in rural China, as well as family, economy and identity in the Chinese diaspora. She has taught anthropology at Middlebury College in Middlebury, Vermont since 1985.

Her most recent book, Bitter and Sweet: Food, Meaning and Morality in Rural China (University of California Press, 2017) examines the social and cultural role of food in rural China. Based on fieldwork in a Hakka Chinese village in southeast China, it considers a number of issues, including food’s role in labor and exchange, its centrality in historical memory, and its importance in ideas about moral obligation and sociality. Previous books include “Drink Water, but Remember the Source:” Moral Discourse in a Chinese Village (University of California Press, 2010), and Blood, Sweat and Mahjong: Family and Enterprise in an Overseas Chinese Community (Cornell University Press, 1993). She is co-editor, along with Lynellyn Long, of Coming Home? Refugees, Immigrants and Those Who Stayed Behind (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). Currently she is working on a new project exploring meanings of commensality in contemporary China.

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.

Jun ZHANG was trained as a socio-cultural anthropologist with a regional focus on China. With an interdisciplinary approach in her research, Zhang is interested in social transformation, particularly the gap, ambiguity, contradictions, and interactions between the grand narratives and mundane practices. Her research projects follow two paths. With the first path, she follows her urban middle-class interlocutors to explore a wide range of topics from family making and class making to ethical negotiation and nationalism. Zhang’s second path follows a material culture approach through which she examines the usage of material objects in everyday lives such as cars, bicycles, and smartphones as well as the built environment such as streets, parks, and bridges. She is the author of “Driving Toward Modernity. Cars and the Lives of the Middle Class in Contemporary China” (Cornell University Press, 2019) and multiple articles in journals such as Journal of Contemporary Asia and Mobilities.

Kunisuke (Kuni) Hirano is a senior assistant professor at Keio University. He received his PhD in Asian Languages and Cultures from the University of Michigan. Trained as an anthropologist, he is interested in education, life histories, gender and sexuality, Japanese studies, and Korean studies. His doctoral dissertation, “Educated to Participate: Interaction and Imagination in Three Alternative High schools in Contemporary Japan,” investigates how schools with unique cultures offer students second chances for being reflexive and building up interpersonal connections. Aside from Education, based on his broad interest in minority and social life, he has published articles in the fields of migration, sexuality, and ethnicity. They include “In Search of Dreams: Narratives of Japanese Gay Men on Migration to the United States” in Queering Migrations Towards, From, and Beyond Asia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) and “The Shifting Boundary of Minority Identities: The Japanese American Citizens League and Same-Sex Marriage” (Japan Oral History Research, 2011). He also edited a special volume on the intersectionality of anthropology and Japanese studies for the Japanese Journal of Cultural Anthropology [bunka jinruigaku] in 2024 (in Japanese).

Claudia Huang is Assistant Professor of Human Development at California State University, Long Beach. She was the 2021-2022 An Wang postdoctoral fellow at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University. Her research areas include the anthropology of aging, kinship and intergenerational dynamics, and state-society relations in contemporary China. She is particularly interested in how social change can alter people’s experiences of the life course in general and the aging process in particular. Her current book project, titled Dancing for Their Lives: The Pursuit of Meaningful Aging in Urban China, is a case study on a strikingly popular “dancing grannies” phenomenon that has emerged in Chinese cities in recent years. Her work has appeared in The Journal of Aging Studies and Asian Anthropology.

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).

Councilor 2025-26-27, lxs463 [at]case dotedu

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.

Xinyu Guan is a Lecturer in Social Studies at Harvard University. As a political anthropologist of the built environment, Xinyu examines how state-constructed housing shapes everyday notions and practices of citizenship in Singapore, especially for queer and migrant communities. His research interrogates the forms of racialization and sexual discipline in the built environment and explores the possibility for a queer transnational anthropology of Singapore. Xinyu has a PhD in Anthropology from Cornell University. .

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.

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.