Minh Duong Minh Le-duc Duong (he/him) (mduon022@ucr.edu) is currently pursuing a PhD in the Comparative Literature Department at UCR. He started his academic journey in the Netherlands, where he earned a full merit scholarship from Utrecht University to attend its international liberal arts college, University College Utrecht. He then completed his MSc. in Modern Literature at Edinburgh University in Scotland. After his master’s degree, he spent two years working as a visiting lecturer at the University of Language and International Studies in Hanoi. His current research interests focus on the Vietnamese diasporas, particularly in how the international communities imagine their collective and individual discourses of history at the site of trauma and of nationalism. He is invested in examining the power of personal historical narratives in destabilizing the hegemony of Vietnam’s institutional history.
Rory Fewer Rory Fewer (he/him) (rfewe001@ucr.edu) is a Ph.D. student in the ethnomusicology program at University of California, Riverside. His research interests include Bangkok’s club scene, queer affect, and the making-rhythmic of the “ethnic” within dance music aesthetics. His current project examines electronic dance music as a tool of futurity praxis within queer rave collectives in Bangkok. Rory holds a B.A. in individualized study from New York University.
Sean Keenan Sean T. Keenan (he/him) (sean.keenan@ucr.edu) is pursuing a PhD in History at the University of California Riverside. He received his BA in History from Western Connecticut State University and an MA in Social Sciences from the University of Chicago. His research project examines the formation of the China-Vietnam border and colonial state building in Northwest Vietnam and Southwest China. Through studying state infrastructure, he hopes to explore themes of environment, transnational identity, labor, resistance, and state power in the China Vietnam borderlands.
Joshua Lieto (jliet001@ucr.edu) is a graduate student in the Department of Anthropology at UC Riverside. Through his research on the Batak languages of Sumatra, Indonesia, Joshua challenges conventional perspectives of “language death” by illuminating the entanglements of material culture, language, and meaning. In the process, Joshua hopes to use technologies such as textual digitization and 3D printing to inspire others to tell their own stories.
Lisistrata Lusandiana Lisistrata Lusandiana (llusa001@ucr.edu) is a Ph.D. student in the Anthropology department at UC Riverside. She is a recipient of the Dean’s Distinguished Fellowship Award and a Fellow of the Fulbright Foreign Student Program. She graduated with B.A. in English Letters from Universitas Sanata Dharma, Indonesia and M.A. in Cultural Studies from the same university. She has worked in an interdisciplinary cultural scene, in the gallery, library, archive institution and museum (glam). Her research interests revolve around aesthetics, tourism, the politics of remembrance, decolonizing methodologies, and situated knowledge.
Anh Ly Anh Ly (aly012@ucr.edu) is an international graduate student from Calgary, Alberta (Canada). She is currently a Ph.D. student in Anthropology at UCR. Her research examines the politics and governance of tuberculosis control strategies in Vietnam with the aim of elucidating how infectious disease infrastructures are important sites of postcolonial governance and civic engagement. Anh completed her M.A. in Anthropology at the University of Calgary, and her thesis examined the transnational practices of second-generation Vietnamese-Canadians, particularly their experiences of travel and “return” to Vietnam on homeland trips. Her broader research interests include medical anthropology, critical global health, colonial medicine, health in transitioning states, and Southeast Asia.
David McCaskey David J McCaskey (he/him) (dmcca005@ucr.edu) is a Ph.D. student in the History Department at UCR. He is researching the history of marine science, fishery management, and colonialism in Vietnam.  His project examines the ways in which people have tried to understand the ocean in colonial French Indochina.  David completed his BA in History at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa in 2013 and his MA at SUNY UB in 2017.  His broader academic interests include Southeast Asia, environmental history, postcolonialism, animal history, and science and technology studies, and his broader non-academic interests include aquariums, fishing, hiking, and film.
Areispine Dymussaga Miraviori Areispine Dymussaga Miraviori (Aga) (it/its/any pronoun) (amira067@ucr.edu) is pursuing a Ph.D. in the Department of Comparative Literature, with research interests including Indonesian modern literature and cultural studies. Aga’s published research, both in scientific journals and popular media, talks around the issue of the resistance against Indonesian political strains in film, theatre, and literature. Aga’s current research focuses on Indonesian literature movements, particularly in the relation to the communities and its cultural production, to seek the shifting motives of the spaces. Aga is also actively involved in arts projects, including visual art and music.
David Siglos David Siglos Jr. (he/him) (dsigl001@ucr.edu) is a Ph.D. candidate in the English Department at the University of California, Riverside. His research interests include 20th – 21st Century American and Asian American Literature, Filipino American Literature, Postcolonial Theory, Global Modernism, Postmodernism, The Nation and Narrative, The Theory of the Novel, Media Studies, and Theater and Performance. David’s dissertation project, entitled “Arte-culations: The Novel Form and the Filipino Style of Being,” explores contemporary Filipino American novels to describe the inner-workings of what he calls “the Filipino style of being.” He argues that to think about the Filipino culture as a style is to account for the aesthetic dimension of its production and provide a historical context which corresponds with Philippine conditions of modernity.