Dr. Judy Wu
Prof. Judy Tzu-Chun Wu is the chair of the Department of Asian American Studies at UC Irvine. She received her Ph.D. in U.S. History from Stanford University in 1998 and taught at Ohio State University for 17 years before coming back to California. Her research analyzes intersectional forms of power and how individuals and communities navigate and challenge these structural forms of inequality. She wrote Dr. Mom Chung of the Fair-Haired Bastards: The Life of a Wartime Celebrity (published in 2005 by the University of California Press), a biography of the first Chinese American female doctor. She also wrote Radicals on the Road: Internationalism, Orientalism, and Feminism during the Viet Nam War (published in 2013 by Cornell University Press), a study of the international travels of people of color and women who opposed the U.S. War in Viet Nam and how these travels shaped their politics and identities. She is working on a political biography of Patsy Takemoto Mink, the first Japanese American lawyer, the first woman of color U.S. Congressional Representative, and the co-sponsor of Title IX.
Dr. Yen Le Espiritu
Originally from Vietnam, Yến Lê Espiritu is Distinguished Professor and former three-term Chair of the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, San Diego. She has also served as the President of the Association of Asian American Studies. An award winning author, she has published widely on Asian American panethnicity, gender and migration, and U.S. colonialism and wars in Asia. Her most recent book is Body Counts: The Vietnam War and Militarized Refuge(es) (University of California Press, 2014). She is the recipient of several UCSD teaching awards, and the inaugural recipient of the Association for Asian American Studies Mentorship Award—for outstanding mentorship of undergraduates, graduate students, post-doctoral fellows and/or colleagues in the field of Asian American Studies.