Board of Advisors

Leo Ching

Leo Ching is Associate Professor and former Chair of Asian & Middle Eastern Studies at Duke. His research interests include colonial discourse studies, postcolonial theory, Japanese mass culture, and theories of globalization and regionalism. He is the author of Becoming Japanese: the Politics of Identity Formation in Colonial Taiwan (UC Press, 2001). He has published in boundary 2, positions, Public Culture and Cultural Studies. His works have been translated into Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Spanish.

Simon Partner

Simon Partner is the Director of the Asian/Pacific Studies Institute and Professor of History at Duke University. His work deals with late 19th and 20th-century Japanese history, focusing on the growth of consumer markets; technology and social change; and Japanese rural society.

Nayoung Aimee Kwon

Nayoung Aimee Kwon is Andrew W. Mellon Assistant Professor of Korean and Japanese Cultural Studies in the Department of Asian & Middle Eastern Studies, Women's Studies and the Program in the Art of the Moving Image. Her research and teaching interests include transcultural co-productions (literature, film, theater) between Korea and Japan; Korean and Japanese literary and filmic exchanges; theories of empire, translation, and postcoloniality; globalization and trans-pacific migrations and cultural flows between Asia and America. She is also a translator of Korean and Japanese literatures into English.

Ralph Litzinger

Ralph Litzinger is an Associate Professor of Cultural Anthropology and Women's Studies, Faculty Director of Global Semester Broad and Director of DukeEngage-Beijing. His current research deals with questions of border ecologies, bio-politics, activism and advocacy in labor, education rights, and the environment.

Edmund J Malesky

Edmund Malesky is a specialist on Southeast Asia, particularly Vietnam. Currently, Malesky's research agenda is very much at the intersection of Comparative and International Political Economy, falling into three major categories: 1) Authoritarian political institutions and their consequences; 2) The political influence of foreign direct investment and multinational corporations; and 3) Political institutions, private business development, and formalization.