The Department of Asian American Studies would like to extend a warm welcome to our two new postdoctoral fellows. Welcome to Drs. Vivian Yan-Gonzalez and Emi Sawada!

Vivian Yan-Gonzalez

Vivian Yan-Gonzalez is a historian of race and politics in the 20th C US. She completed her PhD at Stanford University this year with her dissertation entitled “A Spectrum Apart: Chinese and Japanese American Republicans and Conservatives, 1920-1990.” She is originally from southern California and has been living in Chicago since fall 2019 with her husband Nathan, 7-month-old baby Lucas, and a gray cat named Lando. Unfortunately, none of them are very interested in wearing the sweaters she knits for them. She's excited to join the Department of Asian American Studies and is looking forward to meeting everyone!

Emi Sawada

Emi Sawada holds a Ph.D. in American Studies from New York University, where she specialized in Comparative Ethnic Studies and Gender & Sexuality Studies. Broadly, her research examines 20^th and 21^st-century literature, visual culture, and performance that responds to, and emerges from, the historical intimacies of Europe, Asia, Africa, the Americas, and the Pacific. Her scholarship brings together multiple subfields of Critical Ethnic Studies with queer, feminist, counter-humanist, and psychoanalytic theory, focusing on issues of maternity, intimacy, and loss. Her first book project investigates the aesthetic practices of contemporary Asian American and Chicanx/Latinx artists in California and Hawai’i, expanding the “borderlands” region of the US Southwest into the Pacific Ocean.