thomas tam

2017-2018 CUNY Thomas Tam Visiting Professor

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Sujani K. Reddy is the 2017-2018 Thomas Tam Visiting Professor of Asian American Studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Dr. Reddy’s work focuses on histories of U.S. imperialism, immigration, and South Asian diaspora, as well as mass criminalization, immigrant rights, transnational feminism, and struggles for liberation. She is the author of Nursing & Empire: Gendered Labor and Migration from India to the United States (UNC Press, 2015) and co-editor of The Sun Never Sets: South Asian Migrants in an Age of U.S. Power (NYU Press, 2013). Both books are also published in South Asia by Orient BlackSwan.

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Unsettled: The Cambodian Refugee in the NYC Hyperghetto

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Among the hundreds of thousands of survivors confined to refugee camps in the wake of the Khmer Rouge genocide, approximately 10,000 Cambodian refugees were eventually “resettled” in the Bronx over the course of the 1980s and ’90s. Chronicling their unfinished odyssey, through the eyes of one woman, Ra Pronh, Unsettled tells the story of an immigrant community’s survival and resistance amid the concentrated poverty of the Bronx. As the first book about Cambodian Americans in New York City, Unsettled also challenges commonly held notions of humanitarian rescue and relief. A community-embedded scholar, author Eric Tang argues that refuge cannot be found when resettlement efforts seek to mask the harsh urban conditions faced by poor people of color and immigrants in cities across the country.

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2016-2017 CUNY Thomas Tam Visiting Professor

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Eric Tang is the 2016-2017 CUNY Thomas Tam Visiting Professor at the CUNY Graduate Center. Prof. Tang is an Associate Professor in the African and African Diaspora Studies Department and faculty member in the Center for Asian American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. He also holds a courtesy appointment in the Department of Sociology and serves as a faculty fellow with both the Institute for Urban Policy Research & Analysis and the Division of Diversity and Community Engagement. Unsettled is his first book.

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2015-2016 CUNY Thomas Tam Visiting Professor

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Angie Y. Chung is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University at Albany, SUNY, and the 2015-2016 Dr. Thomas Tam Visiting Professor at the CUNY Graduate Center and Asian American / Asian Research Institute (AAARI). She is author of Saving Face: The Emotional Costs of the Asian Immigrant Family Myth (Rutgers University Press, 2016) and Legacies of Struggle: Conflict and Cooperation in Korean American Politics (Stanford University Press, 2007). She is currently conducting research with co-PIs Sookhee Oh and Jan Lin for a National Science Foundation-funded project on immigrant redevelopment politics in Koreatown and Monterey Park. Chung has published on the topics of ethnic politics, interethnic coalitions, immigrant families, ethnic enclaves and second generation in various journals such as Ethnicities, Urban Affairs Review, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, and Qualitative Sociology.

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The Political Activism of Sikhs in Canada and the United States

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Dr. Prema Kurien will discuss differences in the civic and political activism patterns of Sikhs in Canada and the United States. Dr. Kurien’s talk draws on an ongoing research project examining how differences in the social, political, and religious opportunity structures of Canada and the United States, as well as the characteristics of groups, shape the political incorporation of religious minorities. South Asians comprise the largest “visible minority group” in Canada.

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2014-2015 CUNY Thomas Tam Visiting Professor

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Prema Kurien is the founding director of Asian/American Studies and Professor of Sociology at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs. Dr. Kurien is a past CUNY Thomas Tam Visiting Professor at the CUNY Graduate School, 2014-2015. Her recent research focuses on race and ethnic group relations, as well as the role of religion in shaping group formation and mobilization among contemporary ethnic groups.

Dr. Kurien has received postdoctoral fellowships and grants from the National Science Foundation, The Woodrow Wilson International Center, the Carnegie Corporation, the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, the Pew Charitable Trusts, the Center for the Study of Religion at Princeton University, the American Institute of Indian Studies, the Louisville Institute, and the New Ethnic and Immigrant Congregations Project. Her work has been recognized with a Contribution to the Field award, two national book awards, and three national article awards.

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