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, he will teach ASAM 1170 -001– Beyond "Hate": Violence in Asian American History.