The Asian American / Asian Research Institute’s CUNY Faculty Research Support Program is designed to support CUNY faculty to conduct research that seeks to answer critical questions about Asian American and Asian diasporic communities. The program is open to research across all disciplines, including the social sciences, humanities and arts, health sciences, public health, etc. Priority is given to research that supports a work in progress (e.g., book project, article, major proposal submission, creative work, etc.) and research that has relevance to current policy questions concerning Asian American communities. AAARI’s aim is to fund research on a diversity of Asian ethnic communities.
2026 Recipients
Project: Documenting the History and Stories of Indo-Caribbean Americans in New York City
Anita Baksh (LaGuardia Community College/CUNY)
Anita Baksh is a Professor in English at LaGuardia Community College/CUNY. Her scholarship focuses on Indo-Caribbean, postcolonial, and diasporic literatures and cultures, exploring migration, identity, and cultural memory. She has published articles such as “Breaking with Tradition: Hybridity, Identity and Resistance in Indo-Caribbean Women’s Writing” in Bindi: The Multifaceted Lives of Indo-Caribbean Women (ed. Rosanne Kanhai) and “Indian Womanhood in Novels by Naipaul and Espinet” in Defying the Global Language: Perspectives in Ethnic Studies (ed. Cheryl Toman). Baksh engages in community-based teaching that connects academia with New York City’s immigrant histories.
Project: The Missing Figure of Transnational Adoption: Archival Injustice, State Violence, and Social Reparation
Hosu Kim (College of Staten Island/CUNY)
Hosu Kim is an Associate Professor in Sociology and Anthropology and affiliated faculty in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the College of Staten Island/CUNY, plus doctoral faculty in Critical Social Psychology at the CUNY Graduate Center. She specializes in transnational feminism, reproductive justice, Korean diaspora studies, and state violence. Her publications include Birth Mothers and Transnational Adoption Practice: Invisible Labour (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), alongside articles in journals like Transnational Blackness and Afro-Hispanic Review. Kim is active in public scholarship and interdisciplinary collaborations on gender and migration.
Project: Project AWARE: Listening for Asian American Youth Perspectives on Factors Impacting Mental Health Service Use
Amy Lee (John Jay College of Criminal Justice/CUNY & CUNY Graduate Center)
Amy Hyoeun Lee is an Assistant Professor in Psychology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice/CUNY. Her research examines Asian American youth mental health, childhood trauma, health disparities, and evidence-based interventions like trauma-focused CBT. Key publications include “Anger and aggression treatments: a review of meta-analyses” (Current Opinion in Psychology, 2018, 331 citations), “Effects of the ABC intervention on foster children’s receptive vocabulary” (Child Maltreatment, 2017), and “Examining the effectiveness of trauma-focused cognitive behavioral therapy on children and adolescents’ executive function” (Child Abuse & Neglect, 2022). She completed her Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology at St. John’s University and focuses on community-based mental health strategies.
Project: ICT-Enabled Information Access Among Korean Americans: Community and Organizational Adaptation in the New York Metropolitan Area
Eun Jeong Lee (New York City College of Technology/CUNY)
Eun Jeong Lee is a faculty member in Human Services at New York City College of Technology/CUNY. Her scholarship investigates information technologies, aging, health disparities, immigrant communities, and digital access patterns. Notable publications include “User Engagement and Activism on the DACA Hashtag: An Analysis of Tweets” (Norteamérica, 2021, co-authored). She emphasizes hands-on learning in media and community adaptation studies, drawing from her background in journalism and mass communication.
Project: Parallel Politics: Chinese Diaspora on YouTube and the 2024 U.S. Election
Yinxian Zhang (Queens College/CUNY)
Yinxian Zhang is an Assistant Professor in Sociology at Queens College/CUNY. Her research focuses on political sociology, public discourse, Chinese nationalism, digital media, and state-society relations using qualitative and computational methods. Key works include “Nationalism on Weibo: Towards a multifaceted understanding of Chinese nationalism” (The China Quarterly, 2018, 138 citations) and “Political biases and inconsistencies in bilingual GPT models—the cases of the US and China” (Scientific Reports, 2024). Previously a China Public Policy Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard’s Ash Center, she earned her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago.
