Research

Selected Publications

“Asian American Activism,” in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History, ed. Jane Dailey (New York: Oxford University Press, 2023).

Activism is a defining element of Asian American history. Throughout most of their presence in the United States, Asian Americans have engaged in organized resistance even in the face of violent exclusion and repression. These long histories of activism challenge prevailing notions of the political silence of Asian Americans, which have persisted since the rise of the model minority narrative in the mid-20th century. Examining Asian American history through the lens of activism shows how Asian Americans were not simply acted upon, but were agents in forging their own histories. 

“From State-Sanctioned Removal to the Right to the City: The Policing of Asian Immigrants in Southern Brooklyn, 1987-1995,” Journal of Asian American Studies 23, no. 1 (February 2020): 61-92.

Drawing on archival research and oral histories, this article situates the 1995 police shooting of Chinese immigrant teenager Yong Xin Huang within the context of segregationist violence in southern Brooklyn. I argue that hate crimes and policing were interconnected forms of state-sanctioned removal deployed in response to white anxieties as New York became a “majority minority” city in the late twentieth century. Asian immigrants were subject to this removal based on a long history of their racialization as an invasive threat. Connecting the experiences of Asian Americans to those of Black and Latinx New Yorkers, community organizers built multiracial coalitions to claim the right to the city on behalf of its criminalized residents.

“Constructing the Asian American and Latina/o Neighborhood,” Journal of Urban History 46, no. 2 (March 2020): 453-460.

This essay reviews four books that each examine the history of an immigrant neighborhood in the United States: Dawn Bohulano Mabalon’s Little Manila is in the Heart, Ocean Howell’s Making the Mission, Tarry Hum’s Making a Global Immigrant Neighborhood, and Kathryn Wilson’s Ethnic Renewal in Philadelphia’s Chinatown.

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