Foundations of Asian American Studies

Who This Is For

Asian and Asian American identifying folks, writers, creatives, and curious community learners who want a foundation in Asian American studies.

Course Description

This is for all the Asian and Asian American identifying folks who want to think more about the history of their communities in the United States. It is about coming together as a collective, thinking about the flows and friction of people, labor, capital, and ideas that got us to where we are. It is about recognizing the history of our communities and how we can integrate them into our visions of the future.

Perhaps you were not able to take an Asian American Studies course during college, maybe because you were not interested at the time, or you had other things on your plate that you needed to prioritize. Perhaps you did not go to college at all, and a course like this was entirely inaccessible to you. This course is meant to introduce folks to the major themes of the field of Asian American Studies, while also providing a history of Asian America based on migration, labor, and race.

By the end of the course, participants will have a sense of the broad strokes of Asian American studies, how it developed, and its foundational topics; the general history of Asian America; and how to think about Asian American history as it relates to race, gender, and sexuality.

All participants will also receive two reading lists by the end of the course: recommended reading based on each week’s themes, and recommended reading based on the specific interests of participants.

This is a five-week synchronous course that will be held once a week for two hours over Zoom. Folks will only be required to purchase one text, Erika Lee’s The Making of Asian America, which will serve as the main backbone of the course.

What Enrollment Includes

• Google Drive for readings, Vimeo for recordings, Discord for community, and Zoom for live sessions.

Instructor(s)

• Ida Yalzadeh

  Ida Yalzadeh is Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley. She is an interdisciplinary historian who thinks about the relationship between race and empire and who engages in the fields of diplomatic history, Asian American Studies, and Critical Southwest Asia and North Africa (SWANA) Studies, and more specifically, Iranian Diaspora Studies. She earned her Ph.D. in American Studies at Brown University and was previously a Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University and an assistant professor of history at Lehigh University.