Betty Lee Sung, co-founder of the Asian American / Asian Research Institute (AAARI), Professor Emerita, City College of New York, and recipient of the 2017 Association for Asian American Studies Lifetime Achievement Award, established an endowment of $100,000 at the City University of New York to create a research fund under the auspices of AAARI. The fund is intended to support the research by providing funds for a research assistant, copywriter, research travel, acquisition or access to research material and similar costs so that the researcher can complete the project.
2023 Recipient
Aleah Ranjisingh (Brooklyn College/CUNY)
Project: The Asian Caribbean in the Caribbean Diaspora
At present, there is no one text which focuses on Asian-Caribbean immigrants widely speaking—Indo-Caribbean, Chinese-Caribbean, Javanese-Caribbean, Japanese-Caribbean, and other Asian-Caribbean immigrant groups and communities in diasporic spaces. Prof. Aleah Ranjisingh will contribute two chapters to the upcoming edited collection, The Asian Caribbean in the Caribbean Diaspora (Lexington Press). For one of the chapters, Prof. Singh will use her award to conduct research on Chinese-Caribbean immigrants in New York City, and the ways in which they understand self in terms of race and ethnicity. It will center identity formation as persons of Chinese descent, but also with a distinct ethnic identity as voluntary immigrants from the Caribbean (Rogers 2001). She is interested in interrogating: identity and identification choices in New York City; how and if Chinese-Caribbean immigrants understood and experienced anti-Asian hate and discrimination at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, and if mixed race Chinese immigrants also maneuver mixedness and racial defaults (Barratt and Ranjitsingh 2001).
Aleah N. Ranjitsingh (she/her) is an Assistant Professor in the Africana Studies Department and Caribbean Studies Program, at Brooklyn College/CUNY. She received her Ph.D. in the field of Interdisciplinary Gender Studies from the Institute for Gender and Development Studies (IGDS), University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago. Her research focuses on the Caribbean and the Caribbean diaspora, where she interrogates the concepts of gender, race, mixed race, Blackness, identity, and diaspora. She has published in the Journal for Intercultural Studies, the Caribbean Journal of International Relations and Diplomacy, and the Caribbean Review of Gender Studies. She is the co-author of Dougla in the 21 st Century: Adding to the Mix (University of Mississippi Press, 2021), a study of race and the mixed race Dougla identity in the Caribbean and the Caribbean diaspora.
2023 Recipient
Issay Matsumoto (University of Southern California)
Project: Sakadas to Servers: The New Working Class in Postwar Hawaiʻi and the Globalizing Pacific
Issay Matsumoto’s dissertation examines the formation of this new workforce beyond Hawaiian plantations—one that was majority-Filipinx, female, immigrant, and employed in the State’s colonial tourism industry—from the 1950s through the 1990s. It argues that by the mid-century, integration of the “globalizing Pacific” led to the feminization of Hawaiʻi’s long-standingethnically segmented male workforce. Women workers in this new racial capitalist order transformed agricultural Hawaiʻi into the Pacific’s metropolis. New migrants from across the Pacific—predominantly Filipinx and female—were at the center of this transformation as service and hotel workers who pursued social mobility through unionism, and as stewards of community life outside their workplaces. Matsumoto will use his award to conduct oral history and archival research to complete Chapter Four of his dissertation, “Searching for the Union Sister,” which argues that women in hotel and service from the 1950s to the 1970s struggled to see themselves as “sisters” in the labor movement due to the International Longshoremen and Warehousemen Union (ILWU) Local 142’s priorities in industrial agriculture, as well as the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees (HERE) Local 5’s undemocratic and paternalistic structure.
Issay Matsumoto is a Ph.D. student in the Van Hunnick History Department at the University of Southern California. He received his B.A. from Tufts University, majoring in History and American Studies with a minor in Asian American Studies. He is writing a dissertation on labor, migration, and empire in twentieth-century Hawaiʻi.
Submissions are open to researchers within and outside of CUNY, and for projects already started and/or near completion. The amount awarded will range from $1,500 to $3,000. In addition to the award, recipient agrees to the following:
- Acknowledge the Betty Lee Sung Research Endowment Fund and Asian American / Asian Research Institute – City University New York in all versions of the finished work/research/article/book.
- Present their work at an upcoming lecture/conference/workshop at the Asian American / Asian Research Institute in-person/online.
- Allow or obtain permission for the Asian American / Asian Research Institute to feature an excerpt of recipient’s work/research/research/article/book for the Institute’s academic journal, CUNY FORUM: Asian American / Asian Studies, with all appropriate copyright/acknowledgement to the recipient.
Recipient of the research award will be announced sometime in January 2024.
Submission Guidelines
Click here for Submission Form
Proposals should be sent to info@aaari.info, with subject header: 2023 Betty Lee Sung Research Proposal
In your proposal:
- Please complete contact information on submission form.
- Provide 500-word description of your project and detailed budget on what your requested funds will be used for.
- Include relevant backup documentation/materials on work completed to date on the project.
Award Committee: Carol Huang, Russell Leong & Yung-Yi Diana Pan
