Executive Committee

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Leslie Bow is fourth-generation Chinese American hailing from the Bay Area. She is Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of English and Asian American Studies and Dorothy Draheim Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is the author of the award-winning, ‘Partly Colored’: Asian Americans and Racial Anomaly in the Segregated South (New York University Press, 2010); and Betrayal and Other Acts of Subversion: Feminism, Sexual Politics, Asian American Women’s Literature (Princeton University Press, 2001). She edited the four-volume Asian American Feminisms (Routledge, 2012); a reissue of Fiona Cheong’s novel The Scent of the Gods (Illinois University Press, 2010); and is co-editor (with Russ Castronovo) of the forthcoming anthology The Oxford Handbook of Twentieth-Century American Literature (Oxford University Press, 2022). Her new book, Racist Love: Asian Abstraction and the Pleasures of Fantasy, is out with Duke University Press.

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Cindy I-Fen Cheng is a historian by training with an emphasis in feminist studies and critical theory. After taking her first Asian American Studies course as an undergraduate at the University of California, Los Angeles, she was hooked. She completed her Ph.D. at the University of California, Irvine, hoping that one day she could share with others just how transformative it was for her to see herself represented in U.S. history and culture. She dedicated her first book to exploring how Asian Americans shaped U.S. Cold War culture and in particular, the credibility of our nation’s democracy. Citizens of Asian America: Democracy and Race during the Cold War (New York University Press, 2013) won the Asian Pacific American Librarians Association’s Award for Literature in Adult Non-Fiction. She followed this book by editing The Routledge Handbook of Asian American Studies (Routledge, 2016). She has also published numerous articles that have appeared in the American Quarterly, Journal of Asian American Studies, and other academic journals and anthologies. Currently, she is working on a book length study on race, immigration, urban poverty, and the growth of California’s skid rows.

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Peggy Myo-Young Choy (M.F.A., 2006) is Director of Asian American Studies and an Associate Professor of Dance at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Specializing in Asian dance (Korean and Javanese forms), Asian martial and vital energy arts, she teaches her contemporary Dance Noetics that encompasses Asian/Asian American dance, martial arts and vital energy thought, practice, and explorations into Afro-Asian fusion. Her courses include Asian American Movement, Afro-Asian Fusion, Taijiquan, and Javanese dance. She is a choreographer and dancer, and the artistic director of Peggy Choy Dance (2010), a New York-based dance company, and President of The Ki Project, Inc., a non-profit organization that committed to performance and creative thinking for future generations.

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Lori Kido Lopez is Professor of Communication Arts andAsian American Studies. She currently serves as an Associate Dean for the Social Sciences. Her research examines the way that minority groups such as women, racial minorities, and queer communities use media in the fight for social justice. Dr. Lopez is the author of Asian American Media Activism: Fighting for Cultural Citizenship, Micro Media Industries: Hmong American Media Innovation in the Diaspora, and Race and Digital Media: An Introduction.  She is also editor of Race and Media: Critical Approaches, and co-editor of the Routledge Companion to Asian American Media.  She is the recipient of many awards for her research, teaching, and service, including the Board of Regents’ Diversity Award from the University of Wisconsin System, the Chancellor’s Inclusive Excellence Distinguished Teaching Award, the Early Career Achievement Award from the Association for Asian American Studies, and the Outstanding Women of Color Award from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. 

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Stacey J. Lee is Professor in Educational Policy Studies and a faculty affiliate in Asian American Studies. She received her Ph.D. in Anthropology of Education from the University of Pennsylvania, M.A. in Political Science from New York University and A.B. in Political Science from Vassar College. Her research focuses on the role of education in the incorporation of immigrants into the US. She is the author of Unraveling the Model Minority Stereotype: Listening to Asian American Youth and Up Against Whiteness: Race, school and immigrant youth.

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Morris Young is Director of English 100, Professor of English, and faculty affiliate in Asian American Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.  His research and teaching focus on the relationship between writing and identity, the intersections of literacy and rhetorical studies, and Asian American literature and culture. Morris’s current research interests take up rhetorical space as both metaphor and material and how this shapes rhetorical activity in response to exigencies of exclusion, marginalization, and containment. His book, Minor Re/Visions: Asian American Literacy Narratives as a Rhetoric of Citizenship (2004) received the 2004 W. Ross Winterowd Award and the 2006 CCCC Outstanding Book Award. His co-edited collection (with LuMing Mao), Representations: Doing Asian American Rhetoric(2008), received honorable mention for the 2009 MLA Mina P. Shaughnessy Award.

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Timothy Yu is Professor of English and Asian American Studies. He is the author of Race and the Avant-Garde: Experimental and Asian American Poetry Since 1965 (Stanford University Press), which won the Book Award in Literary Studies from the Association for Asian American Studies, and the editor of Nests and Strangers: On Asian American Women Poets (Kelsey Street Press).  He is also the author of a poetry collection, 100 Chinese Silences, the editors’ selection in the NOS Book Contest from Les Figues Press.