Program Director: Prof. Frances Negrón-Muntaner, 422 Hamilton; 854-0507;fn2103@columbia.edu

Assistant Director: Leon James Bynum, 424 Hamilton; 854-0510; ljb39@columbia.edu

Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race: 423 Hamilton; 854-0507

Interdepartmental Committee on Asian American Studies

Asian American studies examines, across the disciplines, the past and present positions of Asians primarily in the United States. Its methods and theories draw from allied fields such as ethnic, women’s, queer, critical, and Asian area studies, as well as from disciplines across the humanities and social sciences. Its subject matter is as capacious as the “Orient” and the naming, classifying, and ranking of those peoples, lands, and waters by Europeans, and Asian engagements with those discursive constructs and material realities. The United States, although simply one site of those global relations, figures prominently within Asian American studies, and in turn the field claims an apprehension of the nation-state from the perspective of the Asian American experience. Importantly, thus, Asian American studies enables explanations of majority-minority relations, interactions among peoples of color, and the intersections of racial and other social formations in the U.S.,in effect, “American” studies, along with the transnational concentrations and flows of capital, labor, and culture.

The program’s curriculum builds upon the foundational course ASAM W1010 Introduction to Asian American studies, which surveys the methodologies and theories central to the field of study, offers a critical analysis of key concepts and texts, and provides a historical overview of Asians in the Americas. Asian American subjectivities are explored in introductory courses on Asian American literatures and cultures and on diasporic and transnational communities and social formations. Advanced courses on gender and sexuality, Asian American women, race and art, Asian American youth cultures, and Asian Americans and the law allow students to deepen their understanding of Asian Americans and their social locations.