WANDA ADAMS was born and raised on the island of Maui, growing up in verdant ‘Iao Valley where her parents owned a small hotel and restaurant. She learned to cook at the hands of her Portuguese grandmother, helped her grandfather in his sprawling garden, and simply could not be kept out of the hotel kitchen. Besides serving as the food editor for Hawai‘i’s major daily newspaper, the Honolulu Advertiser, Adams has penned numerous cookbooks and books about local food in Hawai‘i.
DENISE CRUZ is an assistant professor of English at the University of Toronto. She is the author of Transpacific Femininities: The Making of the Modern Filipina and the editor of Yay Panlilio’s The Crucible: An Autobiography of “Colonel Yay,” Filipina American Guerrilla. Her research, which centers on the use of spatial and geographic frameworks to analyze gender and sexuality in national and transnational culture, has appeared in American Quarterly, American Literature, Modern Fiction Studies, and PMLA.
ERIN M. CURTIS is a PhD candidate in the Department of American Studies at Brown University, where she also holds an MA in public humanities. Her dissertation, “World Donut: Cambodians, Donut Shops, and Los Angeles, 1979–Present,” examines Los Angeles’s Cambodian doughnut shops in relation to the history of mass food production, U.S. refugee policy, and the city’s physical and cultural landscapes. She lives in Los Angeles, where she works as an assistant curator at the Skirball Cultural Center.
JENNIFER HO is an associate professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she teaches courses in contemporary American, multiethnic American, and Asian American literature. Her first book, Consumption and Identity in Asian American Coming-of-Age-Novels, examines the intersection of coming-of-age, ethnic identity formation, and foodways in late-twentieth-century coming-of-age narratives and American popular culture. Her current book manuscript, “Telling Stories, Making Knowledge: Racial Ambiguity in Asian American Culture,” investigates the theme of racial ambiguity and Asian American culture through diverse subjects like transracial/transnational adoptees, Tiger Woods, and mixed-race literature.
NINA F. ICHIKAWA is the food and agricultural editor for Hyphen, a print and online magazine profiling the culture, arts, and politics of Asian America. In 2011, she was named Food and Community Fellow by the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, a fellowship for writers and activists “working to create a just, equitable and healthy food system in the United States.” She is a co-convener of AAPI Food Action and worked as an assistant to the Obama administration’s “Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food” program at the U.S. Department of Agriculture. She has written for Rafu Shimpo, Nikkei Heritage, Civil Eats, and Gist and is the fourth-generation descendant of Northern California Japanese American flower growers.
HEIDI KATHLEEN KIM is an assistant professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She has published articles on various topics in nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature, such as the Mississippi Chinese and the novels of William Faulkner (Philosophical Quarterly) and the Louisiana Francophone antislavery novel Le vieux salomon. Her article on the public discussion of plastic surgery and racialized appearance as it affected the Korematsu landmark Supreme Court case on the Japanese American incarceration appeared in a special issue of the Journal of Transatlantic American Studies. She is currently finishing her first book manuscript, “Invisible Subjects: Asian Americans in Postwar U.S. Literature,” and is editing an incarceration memoir, correspondence, and artwork of the Hoshidas, a Japanese American family in Hawai‘i.
ROBERT JI-SONG KU is an associate professor of Asian and Asian American studies at Binghamton University of the State University of New York. He has previously taught at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, where he chaired the Department of Ethnic Studies, as well as Hunter College of the City University of New York, where he directed the Asian American studies program. His writings appear in a wide array of publications, including Amerasia Journal, Journal of Asian American Studies, Food and Foodways, and Gastronomica. He is the author of Dubious Gastronomy: The Cultural Politics of Eating Asian in the USA and is currently coediting a book on hallyu (the Korean Wave) in the United States.
HEATHER R. LEE is a doctoral candidate in American studies at Brown University. Her dissertation, “Chinese Restaurants in the United States: A History of Migration, Labor, and Entrepreneur-ship, 1850–1943,” explains how the Chinese used a loophole in America’s anti-Chinese immigration laws to develop the Chinese restaurant industry into what it is today. To tell this complex story without archival material, she is creating an online platform for the public, organizations, and researchers to share materials on Chinese restaurants. Extending this effort to bridge public and academic interests, she has interned at Museum of Chinese in America in New York City and the Wing Luke Museum in Seattle, and curated exhibits on Chinese restaurants in the United States. She has published essays on migration, food, and Asian American histories. She has an MA in public humanities from Brown University and a BA and MA in history from Emory University.
DAWN BOHULANO MABALON, a third-generation Pinay born in Stockton, California, is an associate professor of history at San Francisco State University. She received her PhD in American history at Stanford University. She is a coauthor of Filipinos in Stockton, a coeditor of Filipinos in San Francisco, and the author of Little Manila Is in the Heart: The Making of the Filipina/o American Community in Stockton, California. She is the cofounder of the Little Manila Foundation, which works for the preservation and revitalization of the Little Manila Historic Site in Stockton, and is a national trustee of the Filipino American National Historical Society.
MARGO MACHIDA is an associate professor of art history and Asian American studies at the University of Connecticut. Born and raised in Hawai‘i, she is a scholar, independent curator, and cultural critic specializing in Asian American art and visual culture studies. Her most recent book is Unsettled Visions: Contemporary Asian American Artists and the Social Imaginary, which received the 2011 Cultural Studies Book Award from the Association for Asian American Studies. She is a coeditor of the volume Fresh Talk / Daring Gazes: Conversations on Asian American Art. She received the 2009 Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Women’s Caucus for Art. She is currently working on her next book, “Resighting Hawai‘i: Global Flows and Island Imaginaries in Asian American and Native Hawaiian Art.”
MARTIN F. MANALANSAN IV is an associate professor of anthropology and Asian American studies and the Conrad Professorial Humanities Scholar at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is an affiliate faculty member in the gender and women’s studies program, the global studies program, and the unit for criticism and interpretive theory. He is the author of Global Divas: Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora, which was awarded the Ruth Benedict Prize in 2003. He is editor and/or coeditor of several anthologies of essays. Currently, he is the social science review editor for GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies, and was on the editorial board of the American Anthropologist, the flagship journal of the American Anthropological Association. His current book projects include the ethical and embodied dimensions of the lives and struggles of undocumented queer immigrants, Asian American immigrant culinary cultures, sensory and affective dimensions of race and difference, and Filipino return migration.
ANITA MANNUR is an associate professor of English and Asian / Asian American studies at Miami University, Oxford, OH, and an associate editor of the Journal of Asian American Studies. She is the author of Culinary Fictions: Food in South Asian Diasporic Culture and has written widely on the topic of food in Asian American contexts. Her work has appeared in Cultural Studies, Amerasia Journal, Massachusetts Review, MELUS, and Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies as well as the collections Taking Food Public, East Main Street: Asian American Popular Culture, and Asian American Studies after Critical Mass. She is the 2012 recipient of the Early Career Award from the Association for Asian American Studies.
VALERIE J. MATSUMOTO is a professor in the Department of History and the Department of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her book Farming the Home Place: A Japanese American Community in California, 1919–1982 examined three generations of men and women. She also coedited the essay collection Over the Edge: Remapping the American West. Her essays on Asian American women artists appeared in Asian American Art: A History, 1850–1970. Her book on nisei girls’ clubs is forthcoming. In 2006, she was the first recipient of the Hoshide Distinguished Teaching Award from the UCLA Asian American Studies Center and, in 2007, received the UCLA Distinguished Teaching Award.
RENÉ ALEXANDER ORQUIZA JR. is an Andrew W. Mellon postdoctoral fellow in American Studies at Wellesley College. He teaches Asian American studies and the Philippine-American relationship. He was a Fulbright scholar in the Philippines and a lecturer in history at the University of the Philippines, Diliman Center for International Studies. He is currently working on a project that connects the attempt to Americanize Filipino food to economic, political, and social forces of the American Empire. He received his PhD in History from the Johns Hopkins University in 2012.
MARK PADOONGPATT is an assistant professor in the interdisciplinary degree programs at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. His research and teaching interests are wide ranging, covering twentieth-century U.S. history, Asian / Pacific American studies, comparative race and ethnicity, immigration, U.S. Empire, urban/suburban communities, food, and leisure. His work has appeared in the Radical History Review and A People’s Guide to Los Angeles. He is currently at work on a manuscript exploring the history of Thai Americans in Los Angeles in the context of U.S. global expansion in Asia and the Pacific during the second half of the twentieth century.
DELORES B. PHILLIPS is an assistant professor of postcolonial literature and theory and codirector of the Postcolonial Research Group at Old Dominion University. She received her PhD in postcolonial literature from the University of Maryland in 2009. Her current book project is “In Questionable Taste,” about the relationship between cultural and culinary representations in cookbooks, memoirs, and fiction.
ZOHRA SAED is a coeditor of One Story, Thirty Stories: An Anthology of Contemporary Afghan American Literature. Her poetry has appeared in Voices of Resistance: Muslim Women on War, Faith and Sexuality, edited by Sarah Hussein; Speaking for Herself: Asian Women’s Writings, edited by Sukrita Paul Kumar and Savita Singh; Seven Leaves One Autumn, edited by Sukrita Paul Kumar and Savita Singh; and, most recently, Sahar Muradi & Zohra Saed: Misspelled Cities. She is currently a PhD candidate at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
LOK SIU is an associate professor of ethnic studies at University of California, Berkeley. Trained as a cultural anthropologist, she works on the areas of diaspora, transnationalism, cultural citizenship, racial and gender formation, cultural politics of food, and Asians in the Americas. Her books include Memories of a Future Home: Diasporic Citizenship of Chinese in Panama and two coedited volumes, Asian Diasporas: New Formations, New Conceptions, and Gendered Citizenships: Transnational Perspectives on Knowledge Production, Political Activism, and Culture. She is currently working on two book projects: a volume of essays tentatively entitled “Transnational Asian America: New Theories and Methodologies in Asian American Studies,” and an ethnography that explores Asian Latino intersections through food, art, and memory. Her exploration of Asian Latino food has included research on Chinese Cuban restaurants.
OLIVER WANG is an associate professor of sociology at California State University, Long Beach, specializing in popular culture and race/ethnicity. He is the author of the forthcoming Legions of Boom: Filipino American Mobile Disc Jockey Crews of the San Francisco Bay Area. He writes on music/culture for National Public Radio, the Los Angeles Times, and KCET’s ArtBound.
SAMUEL HIDEO YAMASHITA is the Henry E. Sheffield Professor of History at Pomona College in Claremont, California, where he has taught since 1983. He is currently working on two long-term food projects. The first is a history of Japanese food, and he has given several public lectures on the subject, including “The Beginnings of ‘Japanese’ Food” and “The Cost of Victory: The Hunger of Evacuated Children in Wartime Japan.” The latter will be published as “The Food Problem of Evacuated Children in Wartime Japan, 1942–1945” in Food in Zones of Conflict. “Licking Salt for the Nation: Food and Diet in Wartime Japan, 1937–1945” will appear in the forthcoming Cuisine, Consumption and Culture: Food in Contemporary Japan edited by Theodore Bestor. His second food project is a study of Pacific Rim fusion cuisine, and he is completing a short history of Hawai‘i Regional Cuisine.
CHRISTINE R. YANO is a professor and chair of the anthropology department at the University of Hawai‘i. She is the author of Tears of Longing: Nostalgia and the Nation in Japanese Popular Song, Crowning the Nice Girl: Gender, Ethnicity, and Culture in Hawai‘i’s Cherry Blossom Festival, Airborne Dreams: “Nisei” Stewardesses and Pan American World Airways, and the forthcoming Pink Globalization: Hello Kitty’s Trek across the Pacific.