Tamara C. Ho – Burma, Asian American literature, migration and diaspora

Dr. Tamara C. Ho received her PhD from UCLA’s Department of Comparative Literature and is an Assistant Professor in the Women's Studies Department at UC Riverside. Her teaching focuses on intersections of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality, Anglophone postcolonial literature, transnational migration, and social change. Her work on Burmese writer Wendy Law-Yone has appeared in A Resource Guide to Asian American Literature (eds. Sau-ling Wong and Stephen Sumida, 2001), Word Matters: Conversations with Asian American Authors (ed. King-Kok Cheung, 2000) and Amerasia Journal. Dr. Ho’s ethnographic essay “Women of the Temple: Burmese Immigrants, Gender, and Buddhism in a U.S. Frame” is forthcoming in Emerging Voices: The Experiences of Underrepresented Asian Americans (ed. Huping Ling, Rutgers University Press, summer 2008). Dr. Ho’s book project “Romancing Human Rights: Gender, Intimacy, and Power between Burma and the West” analyzes human rights and transnational ethical engagement from a Southeast Asian feminist perspective. By examining narratives of displacement and intimacy related to Burma (Myanmar), “Romancing Human Rights” weaves together transnational feminist studies, postcolonial studies, and US ethnic and race studies to theorize the heterogeneous possibilities and limits of (Burmese) identity production within the frames of nation, migration, diaspora, and globalization.

This past year, Dr. Ho has been awarded four major grants. This summer, Professor Ho is co-organizing an interdisciplinary conference “The Supernatural in Southeast Asian Studies: From Manuscript to Film” with SEATRiP Professors Lan Duong (Media and Cultural Studies) and Justin McDaniel (Religious Studies). The conference has received funding from UCOP’s Pacific Rim Research Program, UCR’s Center for Ideas and Society, SEATRiP, Center for Women in Coalition, and the Departments of Media and Cultural Studies and Women’s Studies. In late October and early November 2008 (in honor of Halloween, All Saints’ Day, All Souls’ Day and Día De Los Muertos), UCR will host a transnational film festival featuring works from Viet Nam, Thailand, and Burma that explore supernatural phenomena such as ghosts, hauntings, and spirit channeling. The Supernatural conference will convene Asian/American film directors and diverse scholars to explore common themes of trauma, history, memory, and the spectral. In Winter 2009, Dr. Ho will participate in a CIS Residential Fellowship Group entitled “Beyond Canonicity: Dislocating Eurocentrism Through Encounters with Epistemological Otherness,” with Professors Farah Godrej (Political Science), Keith Harris (English and Media and Cultural Studies), and Setsu Shigematsu (Media and Cultural Studies). The group will be exploring how various bodies of “minoritarian” knowledge rearticulate canonical understandings of political theory, religious studies, feminist theory, and cultural representation. With co-PI Dr. Vorris Nunley (English), Dr. Ho will be organizing a collaborative workshop series with UCLA, supported by funding from the UC Humanities Research Institute, UCR’s Center for Ideas and Society (CIS) and UCLA’s Center for Study of Women (CSW). In 2009, the Emerging Epistemologies Seminar will explore the future of transnational feminist study and praxis in alternating workshops at UCR and UCLA. Dr. Ho will also be participating in an Andrew W. Mellon Research Group at UCR during 2008-09 titled “Asian/American Literary and Cultural Studies in the 21st Century.”

This spring, Dr. Ho was honored as “Outstanding Faculty Member” at the Asian Pacific Student Program Office's 16th Annual Leadership & Service Awards Banquet and received the Charles Weis Service Award from the Chancellor's Advisory Committee on the Status of LGBTs. Next academic year (2008-09), Dr. Ho will be teaching the following courses in the Women’s Studies Department: “Media Imagery of Women and Class,” “Women and Culture,” and “Gender, Human Rights, and Transnationalism.