AARCS Announces 2026-2027 Seed Grant Recipients: 18 Projects Advancing Asian American and Diaspora Scholarship at Stanford
Published on May 12, 2026.
The Asian American Research Center at Stanford (AARCS) is proud to announce the 18 recipients of the 2026-2027 AARCS Seed Grants. These researchers are asking urgent, imaginative, and necessary questions about Asian American and Asian diasporic life, and we are honored to support their work.
This year's cohort consists of 7 faculty members, 10 graduate students, and 1 undergraduate student. Together, they represent the most interdisciplinary and wide-ranging group in our program's history. Their projects move across mixed-race identity, science fiction, double diaspora, gender-based violence, caste, queer art, archives, and much more, drawing from fields as varied as engineering, earth sciences, film and media studies, religion, literature, and medicine. What unites them is a shared commitment to rigorous, creative, and community-based research that advances our understanding of Asian American and diasporic lives and communities.
About the Seed Grant Program
Seed Grants sit at the heart of AARCS's mission to promote interdisciplinary research, cultivate intellectual community, and raise the visibility of Asian American studies across Stanford. By investing in early-stage and ongoing research, we open new pathways for the field and contribute directly to Asian American communities and lives. Previous cohorts have already produced public events, creative works, conference presentations, and forthcoming books. We cannot wait to see what this cohort builds next.
A Snapshot of the 2026-2027 Cohort
Community, Health, and Care
Dr. Adela Wu, a Clinical Assistant Professor in Neurosurgery, noticed that Chinese and Chinese American patients were less likely to access palliative care and more likely to report poorer quality care when they did. In response, they are co-designing a culturally attuned palliative care program alongside Chinese and Chinese American patients and caregivers themselves, building something that did not exist before.
Ally Heesu Kim, a PhD Candidate in Genetics, is expanding CHIPAO (Communication Health Interactive for Parents of Adolescents and Others), a community-based theatrical intervention born in response to two suicide clusters that struck the Palo Alto Unified School District, where Asian American students were disproportionately represented. Now, Kim is responding to a new and urgent need: a recent suicide cluster among transgender and gender non-conforming Asian American students. New performance vignettes will center LGBTQ+ lived experiences, meeting diaspora families in the cultural and emotional spaces where conversation is hardest and most needed.
Joanne Chan, a Masters student in Education turns to a community that is too often rendered invisible: Asian American survivors of gender-based domestic violence in the Bay Area. Through ethnographic research, the project asks how survivors learn from one another, how they build and share knowledge about safety and rights, and what kinds of institutions and communities make that learning possible or impossible.
Diaspora, Identity, and Belonging
Dr. Usha Iyer, Associate Professor in Film and Media Studies, asks: what does it mean to belong to two diasporas at once? Her research follows Indo-Caribbean communities in North America: people who have undergone successive labor migrations across the 19th and 20th centuries, whose identities resist easy hyphenation. Through deep engagement with diasporic media including local radio stations, digital networks, archives, and cultural events, Iyer examines how racial and cultural identity gets made and remade across multiple displaced communities.
Yi-Ting Chung, a PhD student in History, uncovers a striking and largely overlooked story: colonial migrants from Taiwan and Korea who were classified as Chinese under U.S. exclusion law while simultaneously governed as Japanese colonial subjects. Caught between the machinery of two empires, these migrants reveal how race, nationality, and belonging were never stable categories, and how ordinary people navigated systems designed to classify them into contradictions.
Suchismito Khatua, a PhD Candidate in Modern Thought and Literature, is conducting the first comprehensive study of Ifti Nasim (1946-2011): poet, activist, and founder of Sangat, one of the first organizations in the United States for queer immigrant life. Nasim wrote prolifically across Urdu, Punjabi, and English, performed at universities and festivals, and published collections that circulated as underground classics in Pakistan. Yet his poetry has received almost no sustained scholarly attention. Khatua's project traces how Nasim's multilingual poetics unsettles familiar narratives of arrival and assimilation, and opens new ways of imagining queer diaspora.
Science, Technology, and Labor
Ariel Chan, a PhD student in Sociology, goes beyond the headlines to conduct comparative ethnographic research with tech workers in Silicon Valley and China, examining how workers in structurally similar roles experience and make sense of AI integration in vastly different ways. Chan's research centers the Chinese diaspora to show that the future of work is not a single story of technological inevitability, but a contested and geographically uneven terrain shaped by policy, power, and culture.
Dr. Ban Wang, William Haas Professor in East Asian Languages and Cultures and Comparative Literature, launches a faculty workshop on Asian American science fiction, gathering the work of writers like Ted Chiang, Ken Liu, and Alice Sola Kim under the lens of critical dystopia: a mode of storytelling that does not flinch from catastrophe but refuses to abandon the possibility of something better. Together, the workshop will interrogate techno-capitalism, climate crisis, labor exploitation, and the seductive myth of progress.
A Note on Our Process
The depth and ambition of scholarship across all applications were inspiring, and we are grateful to every researcher who applied. Though we wish we could have supported more projects, we received far more applications than our budget allowed. We look forward to opening a new grant round in 2027. Thank you to our donors and supporters whose generosity continues to make this work possible.
To the 2026-2027 AARCS Seed Grant recipients: Congratulations. We are proud to support your work.