Meet Panda Express Postdoctoral Fellows in Asian American Studies 2024 - 2025:
Sonya Chen is a Ph.D. Candidate in Politics and Social Policy at Princeton, where she researches and writes about Asian American politics, social movements, and the politics of solidarity. Her dissertation and book project, titled “Asian Americans and the Politics of Racial Justice,” examines how Asian Americans position themselves in the American racial order and engage in racial politics. Using the contemporary movement against anti-Asian violence as a starting point, the project explores how Asian Americans are making political demands, constructing the political meaning of anti-Asian violence, and (dis)engaging with state institutions meant to address violence. Her research draws upon mixed methods including interviews, discourse analysis, and surveys, and has been published in Politics, Groups, and Identities. In tandem with her academic scholarship, Sonya has been involved in advocating for Asian American studies in K-12 and higher education, building new structures of collective care through mutual aid, and conducting research with community organizations about racial violence and healing.
Sonja will be teaching ASAM 1900 Asian American Politics in the fall 2024.
Mark Tseng-Putterman is a writer, historian, and public educator whose research explores the intersection of Asian American community politics, US imperialism, and social movements during the Cold War. He earned his PhD in American Studies from Brown University in May 2024 and is a 2024-2025 Panda Express Postdoctoral Fellow in Asian American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.
His manuscript-in-progress, Cold War Diaspora: Asian American Internationalism and the Geopolitics of Belonging, draws on community archives, state records, and oral history interviews to explore how Asian Americans' overlapping concerns for ethnic and international politics shaped community politics during the 1950s-1980s. A comparative case study of Chinese, Filipino, and Japanese American engagements with US policy in their countries of ancestry, the project proposes Asian American internationalism as a lens for analyzing the colliding agendas of geopolitical, urban, and ethnic politics that shaped Asian American political claims in the postwar period.
His research has been published or is forthcoming in journals such as Amerasia Journal, the Journal of Asian American Studies, and Pacific Historical Review. With Diane Wong, he is also co-editing a book manuscript on contemporary Asian American activism titled Asian America Rising: New Directions in Asian American Activism, forthcoming with New York University Press in Spring 2025. In addition, he has written widely on issues of race, culture, and activism for general audience publications including Boston Review, The Atlantic, Los Angeles Review of Books, and ROAR Magazine.
In fall 2024, Mark will be teaching ASAM 1170 -001– Beyond "Hate": Violence in Asian American History.