The Asian American Studies Program is pleased to announce the recipients of the ASAM Fellowship for the academic year 2021- 22!
Our warmest congratulations to Sabrina C. Tian, Lily H. Suh, Kingsley Song, and Ziyan Wu.
The fellows will work closely with the ASAM Program exploring critical issues in the field, meeting key scholars, and planning a semester-long speaker series for Spring 2021. The Fellowship awards $1500 and the opportunity to engage their research interest while also building a strong network of colleagues and mentors.
Sabrina C. Tian: "Asian American History through Art: 1850s - Present"
Sabrina is a rising senior from San Jose, California studying Design and Cognitive Science. She is interested in inclusivity and storytelling through design to make knowledge more accessible. Her project aims to curate a timeline of artworks as forms of activism, resilience, and healing throughout Asian American history beginning in the 1850s. Ultimately, she wants to shed light on these experiences and stories through an interactive website for K-12 education. At Penn, she’s involved in Penn Student Design and alpha Kappa Delta Phi, and previously served as Marketing Tri-Chair for Asian Pacific American Heritage Week. In her free time, you can find her making digital food illustrations and trying to keep her propagated plants alive.
Lily H. Suh: "The Evolution of the American Dream across Korean American Migration Narratives."
Lily Suh(she/her) is a freshman in the College of Arts and Sciences from Delaware, and she is interested in majoring in English and minoring in Asian American Studies. Lily is a member of the Asian American Studies Undergraduate Advisory Board and writes for the Ego section of 34th Street Magazine.
Kingsley Song: "Political suppression in South Korea: A decolonial human rights approach to U.S. militarization and the human rights regime"
Kingsley Song is a rising senior from the Bay Area, CA studying Political Science with a concentration in International Relations and a minor in Fine Arts. With interests in a wide breadth of topics from grassroots social movements, intersectional LGBTQ+ identity formation, Asian diasporas, and U.S. militarization, Kingsley seeks to empower communities and honor the complexity of the societal and political factors that shape them. Kingsley's commitment to their communities is reflected in their work as the current chair of the Asian Pacific Student Coalition, board member of the ASAM UAB, and Artist in Residence at the East Coast Asian American Student Union. In their independent research, they are interested in topics of human rights and distributive justice that account for the complex ramifications of colonialism and imperialism. Their project with the ASAM Fellowship aims to deconstruct and reveal connections between political suppression in South Korea and U.S. militarization by applying an interdisciplinary, multi-layered approach that challenges current understandings of human rights. In their free time, Kingsley enjoys cooking family recipes, experimenting with traditional art mediums, gushing about 2D animation, and practicing/composing music.
Ziyan Wu: “The Pension System: Comparison Between China and America"
Ziyan Wu is a rising sophomore in the Huntsman Program. Her target language is German and she is planning to major in Finance. On-campus, she is the vice president of Penn Innovators and The Wharton Undergraduate Founders and Funders Association and the internal chair of Wharton Council. As a Chinese international student, she is concerned with social issues both domestically in China and globally. Inspired by her prior extracurricular experience, she aims to improve the pension systems in China and the US. She plans to visit the countryside of China this summer and perform analytic research on the health and pension situations there. She anticipates exploring if there is gender inequality within the pension system and how the retiring age affects the amount of pension. Additionally, she wants to shed light on the comparison between American and Chinese pension systems, which is valuable to propose sophisticated solutions.