Broadening Asian American Scholarship Across Penn

Khoi Nguyen’s research focuses on Southeast Asian experiences, but it’s also about a lot more—like the entanglement of refugee identities with empire, settler colonialism, racial capitalism, and queerness. “So often identities get treated as fixed categories,” they say. “Understanding structural and systemic discrimination is more important to me.”

Starting in July, Nguyen will be able to explore those issues even more deeply, as one of two 2025-2026 Panda Express Postdoctoral Fellows. The fellowship is funded by the corporate arm of the California-based Panda Restaurant Group, the Panda CommUnity Fund (PCUF), and run through Penn Arts & Sciences’ Asian American Studies Program (ASAM). Nguyen will be accompanied by Elaine Andres, joining a small but growing cohort of fellowship recipients as the program enters its third year.

The fellowship—the first of its kind in Asian American studies across the Ivy League—is addressing a pressing need across academia and on campus. Demand for classes and programming in this field has surged, according to David L. Eng, Richard L. Fisher Professor of English, and ASAM faculty director. “It brings a whole new set of courses to our field and simultaneously introduces Asian American studies to multiple departments,” he says.

Fellows are chosen with an eye toward broadening the scholarship ASAM can offer to various departments. During the 2023-24 academic year, the program hosted its first fellow, Weirong Guo, whose background is in sociology. Last year welcomed two new fellows, Sonya Chen and Mark Tseng-Putterman, who focus on political science and history, respectively. This coming academic year, meanwhile, will usher in Nguyen, who holds a doctorate in American studies, and Andres, whose focus is culture, music, and theory.

That range will help expand an already-robust program. “It’s a unique experience to be able to join an Asian American studies program, particularly on the East Coast, that is already so established and dynamic,” says Chen, who will start as an Assistant Professor in Political Science at Barnard College this fall.

Eng says the fellowship has ambitions beyond Penn, too, aiming to create a pipeline for Asian American scholarship from undergraduates to graduate students to postdoc researchers to professors. “No matter what discipline you’re in, it’s difficult to obtain a tenure-track job unless you first get a postdoc,” Eng says. “What the Panda CommUnity Fund gave us was that pipeline. And it gave us a young group of dynamic scholars doing cutting-edge research.”

Classes Across Disciplines

The fellowship came about in no small part because of an acknowledged need for scholars at an early stage of their careers. Eng and ASAM co-director Fariha Khan were linked to Panda Express because of a student connection—Andrea Cherng, C’99, WG’13, is the daughter of Panda Express founders Andrew and Peggy Cherng and now serves as chief brand officer for the Panda Restaurant Group. Cherng minored in ASAM and served as a pioneering member of the ASAM Undergraduate Advisory Board while at Penn.

That connection and resulting funding from PCUF helped launch a fellowship that is, at its core, very much about teaching. Fellows are required to teach one course per semester, in both fall and spring, that puts them front and center with students and faculty across the University.

“Teaching forces me to clarify my own thinking,” Chen says, “and I am constantly learning from my students, too.”

“No matter what discipline you’re in, it’s difficult to obtain a tenure-track job unless you first get a postdoc,” Eng says. “What the Panda CommUnity Fund gave us was that pipeline. And it gave us a young group of dynamic scholars doing cutting-edge research.”

This past fall, Chen taught a course called Asian American Politics, exploring the key role the community plays in shaping the landscape of the U.S. electorate. She followed up with Policing, Prisons, and Asian America, a spring seminar during which she encouraged students to think through questions about race, violence, and resistance “in a collective way.” (The course fits with her current book project, which delves into the “Stop Asian Hate” movement that emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic.) Guo, who was the first fellow and is now at Harvard on a second postdoc, taught classes on Chinese diasporas, as well as the role of gender, work, and family in a global context.

Incoming fellows Andres and Nguyen are already hard at work planning for their courses. Nguyen, currently a 2024-2025 Provost’s Predoctoral Fellow in the Department of English, will teach Queering Asian America: Kinship, Migration, and Politics this fall, followed by Southeast Asia Refugee Experiences: Humanitarianism to Deportation in the spring. Both courses are rooted in their research, which focuses on the intersections between Southeast Asian and queerness, as well as the formation of refugee identity. “I’m really excited to work across the university and departments, such as women’s and gender studies, history, and others,” Nguyen says.

Because Nguyen is already at Penn, they’ve been able to forge relationships over the past year. “I feel very supported,” Nguyen says, adding, “There’s very much a sense of community here.”

Andres, who, like Nguyen, uses multiple pronouns, studies “the ways that sound and performance attune us to the reverberations of U.S. imperialism.” Their current research focuses on the intersections of U.S. militarism and the interconnected musical and political expressions of Black, Filipinx, and Latinx communities.

This fall, Andres will teach Asian American Popular Culture, where they hope “students bring in the cultural objects that excite them and use those as starting points for our collective study” while learning to think about pop culture “not just as entertainment, but as something that materially shapes how Asian Americans move through the world.” They plan to develop a course on Filipinx American music and performance for the spring.

Part of Something Bigger

Teaching is a core component of the fellowship, but the wider requirement that recipients fully immerse themselves in—and help craft—ASAM’s programming makes the experience stand out, according to fellows interviewed for this piece. Over the course of the year, fellows must plan and participate in one event or workshop of their own devising.

Nguyen has already seen firsthand the value of such programming. In April, they moderated a roundtable discussion marking the 50th anniversary of the U.S. wars in Vietnam and Southeast Asia and diving into the history of Vietnamese and Southeast Asian Americans in Philadelphia since that period. “I want to move away from just commemorating war, trauma, and nation-states to focus on the community,” Nguyen says.

ASAM also prides itself on its breadth and depth, seeking to represent the vast range of histories, identities, and experiences that fall under its purview, Khan says. “It’s really reflective of Asian American studies. It’s not only about the Chinese American experience, or the Korean American experience, or the experience of any one particular group. Our faculty and our course offerings reflect the complete field.”

Chen and Tseng-Putterman, for example, organized a symposium this past fall bringing together scholars and activists to think through the relationship between the University and the wider local community. Both Nguyen and Andres are focused on Southeast Asia, but see their research and work as fitting into the broader fabric of Asian studies. Andres, for their part, is curious about creative events, concerts, and exploring the “soundtrack” of Asian American life in Philadelphia.

These plans are all part of providing students—and the broader campus—with programming that is in high demand. “Students have a hunger,” says Nguyen. “They want to learn their history.” Andres adds that the programming is coming at a time when Asian American studies “feels so urgent,” underscoring the importance of a fellowship that is as socially and politically relevant as it is academically valuable.

The initial support from the Panda CommUnity Fund covered five postdocs over three years, but Eng and Khan hope that the fellowship will become permanent, cementing Penn’s leadership within Asian American studies as the program approaches its 30th anniversary.

“We’re really excited for the next chapter for ASAM,” says Khan. “And we know that our partnerships with our alumni are key for the continued growth and strength of Asian American Studies at Penn.”