{"id":155,"date":"2023-05-18T10:04:06","date_gmt":"2023-05-18T17:04:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/live-usc-dornsife.pantheonsite.io\/transpacific-studies\/?page_id=155"},"modified":"2025-06-02T09:37:04","modified_gmt":"2025-06-02T16:37:04","slug":"dissertation-fellows","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/dornsife.usc.edu\/transpacific-studies\/dissertation-fellows\/","title":{"rendered":"Dissertation Fellows"},"content":{"rendered":" \n\n \n \n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
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\n Lillian Ngan\n <\/h3>\n\n\n<\/div>\n \n \n
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2025 Fellowship<\/h5>\n

Lillian Ngan<\/strong> is a PhD student in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures. Her research focuses on the representation of Vietnam\/ Vietnamese in Sinophone cultural production to interrogate multiple colonialisms, imperialisms, and intersections. By examining the open signifier of \u201cVietnam\u201d in Hong Kong social movement, Sinophone Malaysian literary work, as well as Vietnamese Taiwanese cinematic production, Lillian\u2019s work suggests that the representation points toward the competition and collusion of multiple dominations in the transpacific nexus. It also exemplifies those transpacific relations do not only occur between the United States and Asia, but between all countries that share the pacific. The research enables understudied regions to unveil the comparable decolonial trajectories between East Asia and Southeast Asia, between Sinophone communities and Vietnam.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n<\/div>\n \n <\/div>\n\n\n \n \n \n

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\n Chris Chien\n <\/h3>\n\n\n<\/div>\n \n \n
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2022 Fellowship<\/h5>\n

Chris Chien<\/strong> is a PhD Candidate in the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. His research examines transpacific Cold War visual cultures as they shape conceptions of today\u2019s \u201cNew Cold War.\u201d His dissertation,\u00a0Seeing Non-Sovereignty: US-Hong Kong Entanglement in the Cold War Transpacific,\u00a0<\/i>examines how statist visual technologies, from police photography and colonial archival practice to suburban architectures, have reproduced Cold War visualities defined by binary nationalisms of Authoritarian Communism versus Democratic Capitalism. Drawing on aesthetic political practices such as migrant photography, Indigenous\/First Nations performance art, and refugee video art, this project argues that grassroots experiences of migration and labor under global capitalism belie totalizing Cold War visualities. His scholarly writing has appeared in\u00a0Amerasia Journal<\/i>\u00a0and\u00a0Hong Kong Studies,\u00a0<\/i>and in popular media outlets\u00a0The Funambulist, The Nation,\u00a0<\/i>and\u00a0Jacobin.<\/i>\u00a0He is an organizer with Lausan Collective and Dissenters.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n<\/div>\n \n <\/div>\n\n\n \n \n \n

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\n Rio Katayama\n <\/h3>\n\n\n<\/div>\n \n \n
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2022 Fellowship<\/h5>\n

Rio Katayama<\/strong> is a PhD Candidate in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Southern California. Her research interests include contemporary Japanese cinema and media studies, modern Japanese literature, transnational cinema in East Asia, gender, and affect. Her dissertation, \u201cNarrating Bodies: (De) Constructing Affective Japan Through Disasters\u201d explores the multi-layered (de)construction of Japan-ness and its relations to affective bodily responses that are elicited through the depiction of continuous nuclear trauma in Japanese audiovisual media. Drawing on cinematic, literary, and theatrical representations, her dissertation argues that Japan-ness serves as a vehicle for people to bond and form communities whether the communities are based on the notion of inclusion or exclusion. Her scholarly work has appeared in Celebrity Studies Special Issue: Starring Asia \u2013 Asian Stardom and Celebrity. Her research has been supported by an ACE-Nikaido Fellowship, Barbara F. Inamoto Fellowship in Japanese Studies, USC Graduate School, and the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures.\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n<\/div>\n \n <\/div>\n\n\n \n \n \n

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\n Jenny Hoang\n <\/h3>\n\n\n<\/div>\n \n \n
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2020-2021 Fellowship<\/h5>\n

Jenny Hoang<\/strong> is a PhD candidate in the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. Her dissertation, \u201cLiving Alongside: Tomboys and Ts in the San Gabriel Valley and Taipei,\u201d focuses on the powerful changes that small gestures of understanding and empathy play in building communion between tomboys and their surrounding communities. Drawing on in-depth interviews with participants in Taipei and the San Gabriel Valley, 16 months of fieldwork in Taipei, and fieldwork in the San Gabriel Valley that began in 2012, \u201cLiving Alongside\u201d argues that tomboys engage in persistent and non-confrontational negotiations of their gender and sexuality with kin and strangers alike in order to naturalize their masculinity and normalize their same-sex desires. Jenny\u2019s research has been supported by a Gold Family Fellowship, the Ministry of Education Republic of China, Taiwan, and the Center for Transpacific Studies.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n<\/div>\n \n <\/div>\n\n\n \n \n \n

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\n Rosanne Sia\n <\/h3>\n\n\n<\/div>\n \n \n
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2019-2020 Fellowship<\/h5>\n

Rosanne Sia<\/strong> is an Assistant Professor at the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Social Justice at the University of British Columbia. She received her PhD in American Studies and Ethnicity from the University of Southern California. Her research works across Cold War cultural history, performance studies, critical race studies, and queer studies. Her dissertation, Fantasy in Motion: Performing Racial Imaginaries in the early Cold War, focuses on women of Asian and Latinx descent who danced and sang on nightclub circuits in the early Cold War. Drawing on forty-five oral histories, she argues that performers crossed boundaries of genre, nation, language, race, and sexuality that exceeded Cold War narratives of racial integration. Community engaged scholarship through oral history methodology and practice is at the heart of her research projects.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n<\/div>\n \n <\/div>\n\n\n \n \n \n

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\n Feng-Mei Heberer\n <\/h3>\n\n\n<\/div>\n \n \n
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2014-2015 Fellowship<\/h5>\n

Feng-Mei Heberer<\/strong> is Assistant Professor in the Department of Cinema Studies. She joins NYU from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where she was a Mellon postdoctoral fellow in Global Studies and Languages. She received her PhD from the University of Southern California and holds an MA from the Free University Berlin. In addition, she studied film in France and China on fellowships from the German National Academic Foundation.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n<\/div>\n \n <\/div>\n\n\n \n \n \n

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\n Brandon Som\n <\/h3>\n\n\n<\/div>\n \n \n
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2013-2014 Fellowship<\/h5>\n

Brandon Som<\/strong>\u00a0is Assistant Professor of Literature and Creative Writing at the University of California, San Diego. He received his Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Southern California, and an M.F.A. in Poetry at the University of Pittsburgh. He is the author of The Tribute Horse,<\/em> winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and the chapbook Babel’s Moon, winner of the Snowbound Prize. He was the Anne Newman Sutton Weeks Poet-in-Residence at Westminster College, and was awarded fellowships at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center and Civitella Ranieri. His teaching and writing interests include 20th- and 21st century poetry, transpacific literature, Asian-American and Chicanx poetry, citational poetics, and sound studies.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n<\/div>\n \n <\/div>\n\n\n \n \n \n

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\n Go Oyagi\n <\/h3>\n\n\n<\/div>\n \n \n
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2012-2013 Fellowship<\/h5>\n

Go Oyagi<\/strong> is Lecturer of American culture at Kinjo Gakuin University in Nagoya, Aichi, Japan. His research and teaching interests include US history, Asian American studies, race and ethnicity, nationalism, and social movement. Thanks to a final year dissertation fellowship granted by the Center for Transpacific Studies in 2012-2013, he obtained his Ph.D. from the Department of History at USC. He is currently working on a book manuscript that explores the ways in which Asian Americans developed relations with the peoples in East Asia and intervened in US foreign policy in the post-World War II period.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n<\/div>\n \n <\/div>\n\n\n \n \n \n

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\n Past and Present Transpacific Studies Fellows\n <\/h2>\n\n\n<\/div>\n \n \n \n <\/div>\n \n