Kathy Nakagawa
Interim Director
Associate Professor
Psychology in Education

Office: Wilson 351
Phone: 480.727.6052
E-mail: nakagawa@asu.edu

Dr. Nakagawa is serving as the Interim Director of APAS for the 2008-09 academic year. Her research explores the relationship between families and schools, and includes work on parent involvement and school reform, charter schools, family literacy programs and early childhood dual immersion programs. She received her doctorate from Northwestern University in Human Development and Social Policy.

Rudy Guevarra
Assistant Professor

Office: Wilson 346
Phone: 480.727.9675
E-mail: rpguevarra@asu.edu
Curriculum Vitae

Dr. Guevarra received his Ph.D. in History from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and is a former UC Berkeley Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow (2007-2008).  His research and teaching interests include comparative and relational histories of Asian Pacific Americans and Chicana/o-Latina/os, race and ethnicity, immigration and transnational migration, labor history, and multiracial/multiethnic identity. He is co-editor and contributing author of Crossing Lines: Race and Mixed Race Across the Geohistorical Divide (Alta Mira Press 2005), and guest co-editor of a special issue regarding race, ethnicity and space for The Journal of San Diego History (Winter 2008). Dr. Guevarra is currently working on his book, Mexipino: Mexicans, Filipinos and the Forging of Multiethnic Identities and Communities.  He is also working on a project that examines the historical and contemporary migration of Latina/os to the Hawaiian Islands.

Karen J. Kuo
Assistant Professor

Office: Wilson 358
Phone: 480.965.9121
E-mail: Karen.Kuo@asu.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Audio Clip: "History, Nation, Masculinity"

Dr. Kuo is currently working on a book that explores the effects of U.S. diplomacy, history and American popular culture on early twentieth-century representations of Asia and Asians. Her research and teaching interests focus on representations of Asian Pacific Americans in literature and film, film studies, film theory, immigrant literature, postcolonial theory, and twentieth-century British and American Literature. In addition she is co-editing Japanese Americans in Arizona. Her future work will explore the formation of Taiwanese American communities and identity during the Cold War.

Wei Li
Associate Professor

Office: Wilson 362
Phone: 480.727.6556
E-mail: Wei.li@asu.edu
Curriculum Vitae

Dr. Li is a geographer whose own research explores new patterns of settlement among Asian immigrants in the Americans, and the role of transnational financial networks in their development. Dr. Li has an edited collection, From Urban Enclave to Ethnic Suburb: new Asian communities in Pacific Rim countries and a monograph, Ethnoburb: the New Ethnic Community in Urban America forthcoming from University of Hawaii Press. She teaches classes about Chinese American communities, and the migration of Asian Pacific Americans in the global economy. She is currently serving as the elected Vice Chair of the Census Advisory Committee on the Asian Population of the U.S. Census Bureau.

Jeffrey Ow
Lecturer

Office: Wilson 366
Phone: 480.727.8505
E-mail: jeffrey.ow@asu.edu

Jeffrey A. Ow is a fifth generation Chinese American with a master's in Asian American Studies from UCLA (1994) and is a Ph.D. candidate at UC Berkeley’s Ethnic Studies Department. Jeff’s primary work is on the social and spatial history of the Angel Island Immigration Station (AIIS), located in the San Francisco Bay. AIIS served as an enforcement location for Federal Chinese Exclusionary Laws from 1910-1940, where approximately 200,000 Chinese immigrants were detained and interrogated. Jeff is also interested in writing a memoir about his Asian American family’s struggles with history and health, focusing on the narratives of cancers and addictions that have simultaneously torn apart and reunited family members.

Brandon Yoo
Assistant Professor

Office: Wilson 370
Phone: 480.727.7340
E-mail: yoo@asu.edu
Personal Website

Dr. Yoo received his Ph.D. in Counseling Psychology from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities (August 2006). His research interest broadly examines how racial minorities experience and cope with various culture-specific stressors. One area of particular interest is the role and function of cultural identity in the lives of racial minorities, especially for Asian Americans. This research seeks to answer the following three interrelated questions: 1) What are the structure, measurement, and psychological benefits of the different cultural identities (e.g., racial, ethnic, etc.) for Asian Americans? 2) When and how is cultural identity protective against culture-specific stressors such as racism? 3) What type of experiences and situations are most relevant to the different cultural identity developments?