Research Fellows in Residence

Amy Dao is a medical anthropologist interested in risk, insurance, and global health. Her ethnographic research in Vietnam examined the government’s campaign for universal health insurance coverage and its effects on people’s concepts of risk, money, and social/kinship obligation. Her work has been is supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, the Tokyo Foundation, and the Weatherhead East Asian Institute. Since receiving her undergraduate degree in anthropology at the University of California in Riverside in 2008, she has worked as a project manager on two NICHD-funded social science projects: one on HIV social science research capacity building in Vietnam, and the other on risk and unintentional injury among toddlers in the US. She spent her time in SEATRiP as a visiting research fellow preparing her dissertation manuscript.Amy is currently Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Cal Poly Pomona.

Sylvia Nam received her Ph.D. in City and Regional Planning with a designated emphasis in Global Metropolitan Studies from the University of California, Berkeley. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Comparative Literature and a Master of City Planning also from the University of California, Berkeley. Sylvia’s research focuses on Southeast and East Asia and her engagement is theoretical as well as ethnographic. Her areas of interest include the politics of poverty and development, the construction of cities as experimental terrains of modernity, and the rationalities of speculation and space. While at UCR, she was revising her dissertation on the emergence of Phnom Penh as a city of speculation, while beginning a new line of research on inter-Asian urban circuits, specifically how visions of global urbanism translate across cities.At present, Sylvia is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at UC Irvine: http://www.faculty.uci.edu/profile.cfm?faculty_id=6092

Ma Vang received her Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies at UC San Diego. Her research focuses on Hmong culture and history, ethnic studies, critical refugee studies and immigration,   gender and history, war and US imperialism, and transnationalism.While at UCR, Ma was revising her dissertation on the Hmong diaspora, particularly on the politics of historical knowledge production at the intersections of US Cold War historiography and Hmong historical memory. She is also working on a co-edited book on Hmong women, gender, and power.At present, Ma is an Assistant Professor in the School of Social Sciences, Humanities and Arts at UC Merced: http:// www.ucmerced.edu/content/ma-vang

Long T. Bui received his Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies from the University of California, San Diego. In his teaching and scholarship, Bui explores the intersections of cultures, politics, history, memory and art. His first book manuscript, Returns of War: On the Historical Memory of South Vietnam reframes the legacy of the Republic of Vietnam or South Vietnam through a multi-media analysis of cultural productions which includes ethnography, film analysis, oral history, literary readings and archival research. Bui investigates how individuals in the U.S., contemporary Vietnam and the Vietnamese diaspora recall, recuperate and represent this geopolitical figure of Cold War tensions seen as lost to time. In other areas of work, he seeks to examine queerness and the performance of masculinity, sexuality and gender in mass media as well as space.In 2014, Long became a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Asian American Studies Department at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  He is currently an Assistant Professor of Global Studies at UCI: https://faculty.sites.uci.edu/longbui/

Anh Thang Dao received her Ph.D. in American Studies and Ethnicity from University of Southern California. Dao’s dissertation titled “Writing Exile: Vietnamese Literature in the Diaspora” conceptualizes a deterritorialized notion of exile through the example of Vietnamese diasporic literature in the United States, France and Germany. Her scholarly interests include intersectionality of gender, race and sexuality, theories of transnationalism, exile and diaspora, memory studies as well as Asian and Vietnamese diasporic literature and culture. Her research has been published in positions: east asian cultural critique and Journal of Vietnamese Studies. While at UCR, she taught courses for the UCR Women’s Studies department (renamed Gender and Sexuality Studies department in Fall 2014).Anh Thang is currently working on her book project about undocumented Vietnamese women in post-socialist Europe and Southeast Asian women in the United States. In August 2014, she became an American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Public Fellow and was appointed as Program Manager of Policy and Evaluation, with the San Francisco Arts Commission.ACLS bio: Anh Thang Dao-Shah

Kannikar Sartraproong had training in textual analysis and historical methodology at Chulalongkorn University, Thailand, and Leiden University, the Netherlands. Her main spheres of interest are 19^th century Thai, Malay, English and Dutch writing and contemporary Thai literary writing. Most recently, she has been active in the Project “The Crisis of the Divided Civic Religion in Thailand,” with generous support from the Thailand Research Fund.Some of her major publications are Rajadhiraja, Samkok and Saihan: World Views of the Thai Elites (Bangkok: The Foundation for the Promotion of Social Sciences and Humanities Textbooks Project, 1998) and A True Hero—King Chulalongkorn of Siam’s visit to Singapore and Java in 1871 (Bangkok: Institute of Asian Studies, Chulalongkorn University, 2008).

A specialist in Philippine dance with a Ph.D. from UCR, Russ Patrick Alcedo was the inaugural postdoctoral fellow affiliated with the SEATRiP program and one of 10 Rockefeller Humanities Fellows selected to participate in the 2006-2007 initiative “Theorizing Cultural Heritage” at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC. In February 2007 he co-chaired, with SEATRiP professors Sally Ann Ness and Hendrik M.J. Maier, the UCR conference “Religious Festival in Contemporary Southeast Asia.” In 2008, Alcedo joined the faculty in York University’s Department of Dance. He has taught courses on Philippine Literature, Religious Myths and Ritual, Philippine Dance, and accelerated courses in Tagalog/Filipino.Alcedo’s research explores the relationship between folk festival production and notions of cultural authenticity. His work focuses on the Ati-atihan, a street dance festival that is celebrated in his hometown of Kalibo, Aklan in the Philippines and by Filipino diasporic communities in the US and Canada. Alcedo’s publications include “Sacred Camp: Transgendering Faith in a Philippine Festival” (Journal of Southeast Asian Studies February 2007). His research on the socio-economic conditions of aspiring boxers in the province of Aklan, Philippines resulted in Boxing To Be The Next Pacquiao (2009), a video project he produced with the New York Times. He is also the producer and director of the multimedia project, Ati-atihan: Mother of Philippine Festival (InTensions) and of the forthcoming full-length documentary film, Ati-atihan Lives.Alcedo has received numerous research awards, including the Asian Cultural Council’s Ford Foundation Grant and a UC Pacific Rim Research Grant, and is on the board of the international Congress on Research in Dance. For his achievements and community contributions, in 2012 the Filipino Centre Toronto awarded him the “Young Professional Award,” and the Governor’s Office of his home province of Aklan, central Philippines, “Most Outstanding Aklanon.” In 2014, the Fulbright Association honoured him with the prestigious Selma Jeanne Cohen Award for the field of Dance and Dance Studies.

Prof. Alcedo os currently an Associate Professor at York University: https://ycar.apps01.yorku.ca/people/r-patrick-alcedo/