Foundations of Asian American Studies

Who This Is For

Asian and Asian American identifying folks who want a foundations course 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.

Participants will leave with an understanding of the broad strokes of Asian American studies, how it developed, major foundational topics, a sense of key terms and where they came from, and ways of thinking about Asian American history in relation to race, gender, and sexuality.

Participants should plan to purchase Erika Lee’s The Making of Asian America: A History. Recommended readings will be made available in a shared Google folder.

What Enrollment Includes

• Google Drive and Vimeo for readings, notes, and recordings, plus 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.