Current SEAA Board Members

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.

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).

Sonia Ryang is the T.T. and W.F. Chao Professor of Asian Studies in Rice University. Her research interests are clustered around the issues of ethnological study of cultural logic and fundamental principle of a society, interactions between humans and the environment (including non-human animals and food), scientific knowledge, and social justice. She is particularly interested in anthropological study of North Korea on the one hand and scientific collaboration across national borders traversing Asia and the US on the other.

Teresa Kuan is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology, Chinese University of Hong Kong. Working primarily in the anthropology of China, her research interests include the social life of psychological ideas and practices, subject-formation and moral experience, and the question of how blame and responsibility are distributed and taken in different circumstances. She is the author of Love’s Uncertainty: The Politics and Ethics of Child Rearing in Contemporary China (University of California Press, 2015), and co-editor of a Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry special issue “Moral (and Other) Laboratories” (2017). Recent papers have appeared in Ethnos, Anthropological Theory, and The Monist.

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).

Marvin D. Sterling is Associate Professor of Cultural Anthropology in the Department of Anthropology at Indiana University, Bloomington. His theoretical interests include cultural transnationalism, performance theory, race and global blackness, Afro-Asia, and human rights. His work centers regionally on Japan and Jamaica. He teaches courses on the globalization of African diasporic music, the circulation of racial discourse within and beyond the Western world, world fiction and cultural anthropology, the anthropology of contemporary Japan, and Afro-Caribbean popular culture as protest. He is author of “Babylon East: Performing Dancehall, Roots Reggae, and Rastafari in Japan” (2010, Duke University Press). His current research explores the lives of Japanese citizens of both Japanese and African descent.

Jie Yang is professor of anthropology at Simon Fraser University. She was trained in linguistic anthropology. Her current research focuses on critical studies of mental health and psychology in China. She is editor of the Political Economy of Affect and Emotion in East Asia (2014, Routledge) and author of two monographs: Unknotting the Heart: Unemployment and Therapeutic Governance (2015, Cornell University Press; 2016 winner of Francis Hsu Book Prize) and Mental Health in China: Change, Tradition, and Therapeutic Governance (2017, Polity). She is completing a new monograph on the phenomenon of guan xinbing provisionally entitled Officials’ Heart Distress: Bureaucracy, Double Bind, and Psychologization in China.

Jennifer Prough is an Associate Professor in Christ College, the interdisciplinary honors college, of Valparaiso University. Her research interests include the anthropology of media, the anthropology of tourism, Japanese studies, gender studies, and globalization. At the heart of Prough’s research and teaching interests are issues of representation and the ways that cultural meanings are produced and managed, experienced and interpreted through mass culture. Her book entitled, Straight from the Heart: Gender, intimacy, and the Cultural Production of Shōjo Manga (University of Hawai’i Press, 2011) examines the production of Girls’ comics in Japan through ethnographic analysis. Her most recent book, Kyoto Revisited: Heritage Tourism in Contemporary Kyoto (forthcoming, University of Hawai’i Press) seeks to understand the ways that tradition, history, and culture are produced, packaged, promoted, and consumed in the Kyoto tourist industry.

Yi Wu is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Clemson University. Her research has mainly revolved around the social and cultural transformation of rural communities in China during the People’s Republic period (1949-present). Yi Wu explores these transformations through the lens of property rights, urbanization, agricultural development, and environmental conservation. Her book Negotiating Rural Land Ownership in Southwest China: State, Village, Family (University of Hawaii Press, 2016) explores how the three major rural actors—local governments, village communities, and rural households—have contested and negotiated land rights in agricultural production and in the land market, resulting in a constantly changing hybrid land ownership system. Yi Wu is currently working on an NSF-sponsored project to study the social and cultural mechanisms through which village communities and rural individuals exert control over their collectively-owned land, either successfully or not, in the context of land loss caused by urban development. In addition to the above projects, Yi Wu is also exploring new research areas, such as sustainable rural development and food studies. She is interested in comparative study on how agriculture is planned and operates at the local community level in different social and cultural contexts.

Zachary Howlett is Assistant Professor of Social Sciences in Yale-NUS College and holds a courtesy appointment in the Department of Sociology in the National University of Singapore. His research explores the intersections between education, social inequality, popular religion, marriage, and migration in China and Chinese diasporas. His book, Meritocracy and Its Discontents: Anxiety and the National College Entrance Exam in China (Cornell, 2021), investigates the wider social, political, religious, and economic dimensions of the Gaokao, China’s national college entrance exam, as well as the complications that arise from its existence. His new project examines falling birth and marriage rates and rapid social aging in China with comparison to similar demographic changes across Asia. He focuses on the experiences of educated rural-to-urban and transnational migrant women to illuminate transforming family structures and state power in China and beyond.

Beata Świtek is Assistant Professor at the Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies at the University of Copenhagen. She is a social anthropologist with training in Japan Studies. Theoretically, her interests revolve around the body and its limits, ethical diversity, broadly conceived sustainability, and consumption. Ethnographically she has worked in eldercare institutions, with migrant workers, in Buddhist temples, and among adventure sport practitioners. She conducted research in Japan, Indonesia, and the UK. Beata is the author of Reluctant Intimacies. Japanese Eldercare in Indonesian Hands (Berghahn Books, 2016), and a co-editor, along with Christoph Brumann and Saskia Abrahms-Kavunenko, of Monks, Money, Morality. Balancing Act of Contemporary Buddhism (Bloomsbury, 2021), and, along with Allen Abramson and Hannah Swee, of Extraordinary Risks, Ordinary Lives. Logics of Precariousness in Everyday Contexts (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022). Currently, Beata is working on her second monograph based on research about Buddhist temple economies in Japan.

Tim Quinn is a Ph.D. Candidate in Anthropology at Rice University. His research focuses on the social life of Teno-Em(PrEP), a Thai state manufactured generic HIV prevention drug. Based in Bangkok, his research investigates the drug’s role within contexts of national health governance, as well as within the contexts of an expanding regional biotech market and a growing LGBTQ tourist economy. As this drug is increasingly marketed as both a therapeutic tool and as a modern lifestyle drug for transnationally mobile gay/queer/MSM ‘Asian’ subjects, his dissertation focuses on how encounters and experiments with these drugs are implicated in the production of new forms of knowledge and subjectivity.

Yookyeong Im is a Ph.D. Candidate in Anthropology with the secondary field in Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University. She is interested in critical legal studies, feminist and queer theories, language and semiotics, social movements, and religion. Her current research examines the growing centrality of legal tools in queer activism in South Korea. In her dissertation, she studies how legal ideologies and practices inform changing models of emancipation in a unique context where contesting desires for institutional protection and radical imagination coexist.

Aaron SU, Princeton University, aaronsu[at] princeton.edu
https://anthropology.princeton.edu/people/graduate-students/aaron-su

Aaron Su is a Ph.D. student in Anthropology at Princeton University pursuing certificates in the History of Science & Gender and Sexuality Studies. His research follows recent urban design trends in China that seek to package political, medical, and environmental objectives into comprehensive technical solutions, and inquires into the complex dynamics and processes that arise within such plans. He is also fascinated by the increasingly dominant institutional framework of “planetary health” and wonders about how East Asia is implicated in its midst.