Researchers

Ian Baird
PhD (University of British Columbia)
Professor of Geography, Department of Geography, UW-Madison
E-mail: ibaird@wisc.edu

Ian G. Baird is a Professor in the Department of Geography, University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research covers a wide variety of topics, including political ecology, critical development studies, history, ethnic and indigenous studies, religious studies, and Hmong and Lao Studies. Originally from Western Canada, he has lived, worked and conducted research in mainland Southeast Asia for most of his adult life. His research is especially focused on Laos, Cambodia and Thailand, but he is also interested in diaspora issues related to Southeast Asian immigrants in North America. His most recent research regarding the Hmong focuses on Hmong agricultural networks in Laos and various social networks, and also on the complex relationship between Tham Krabok Buddhist temple in Thailand and the Hmong.

Melissa May Borja, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
Department of American Culture
University of Michigan
Email: Mborja@umich.edu

Dr. Melissa Borja is Associate Professor of American Culture and Asian/Pacific Islander American Studies at the University of Michigan. She earned a Ph.D. in History from Columbia University, an M.A. from the University of Chicago, and an A.B. from Harvard University. A historian of migration, religion, race, and politics, she is the author of Follow the New Way: American Refugee Resettlement Policy and Hmong Religious Change (Harvard University Press, 2023), which won the Thomas Wilson Memorial Prize and the Frank S. and Elizabeth D. Brewer Prize from the American Society of Church History. An active public scholar, Dr. Borja advised Princeton’s Religion and Forced Migration Initiative, co-leads the Asian American Religions in Coalition project, is the lead investigator of the Virulent Hate Project, and contributed research to Stop AAPI Hate. For her research and advocacy on anti-Asian racism during the Covid-19 pandemic, USA Today honored her as one of its 2022 Women of the Year.

Geoff Bradshaw
PhD (University of Wisconsin-Madison, Cultural Anthropology)
Associate Vice President of Intercultural Education, Madison College
Email: gbradshaw@madisoncollege.edu

Geoff Bradshaw is the Associate Vice President of Intercultural Education at Madison Area Technical College (Madison College). In that role he serves as both the Senior International Officer with oversight of the Center for International Education, and the Academic Diversity Officer with oversight of implementation of diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts within academic schools and programs. Geoff has been a national leader in comprehensive internationalization of community and technical colleges and serves in leadership positions in multiple state, regional and national organizations in the field of international education. He has worked as a national trainer through a U.S. Department of State grant in best practices for faculty-led study abroad and served as the national director of the Community College Sustainable Development Network for seven years. At Madison College he has led international education efforts including the establishment of an Interdisciplinary Global Studies Certificate, dual credit partnership agreement with UW-Madison, development of less commonly taught language programs, and oversees the Center for International Education which manages all college study abroad and international student programs.

David Chambers
PhD (University of Wisconsin, Madison)
Professor of Geography, Merced College
Email: david.chambers@mccd.edu

David M. Chambers is professor of Geography at Merced College.  His research focuses on the political geography of Hmong communities in Thailand. His MA thesis focused on the Hmong territorialization at Wat Tham Krabok Temple in Central Thailand.  His PhD research was primarily concerned with the place-making of Hmong immigrants from Thailand’s neighboring countries, including Laos and Thailand.  His dissertation is the first ethnography of the Hmong experience in an urban setting.  He explores the everyday politics of these groups’ territoriality and territorialization as they reposition themselves in the new contexts of several urban communities in Thailand.  Using a geographic perspective which contextualizes the lives of Hmong people in Thailand, his research works to denaturalize the ethnic and cultural determinism sometimes associated with Hmong ethnicity.  Notably his interrogation of territoriality complicates the naturalistic connection of Hmong ethnicity to ethnonationalism and millenarianism often made by governments and scholars.

Christin DePouw
(Ph.D., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
Associate Professor of Education
University of Wisconsin-Green Bay
Email: depouwc@uwgb.edu

Christin DePouw is an Associate Professor of Education at UW-Green Bay. Her research focuses on critical race studies in education, critical whiteness studies, and Hmong American education at predominantly white institutions (PWIs). She focuses on the institutional and interpersonal processes of racism and how discourses of Hmong cultural exoticism or deficiency in higher education serve to render racial processes invisible or natural. Her most recent work examines the relationship between critical racial consciousness and Hmong American students in higher education in the context of increasing student activism for Hmong Studies.

Yan Gao
Associate Professor of Art Guizhou University of Engineering
Science (Bijie College), Bijie City, Guizhou Province, China.
E-mail: gaoqinqin001@126.com.

She completed her MA in art theory at the Art College, Sichuan University in 2007. Her thesis was titled “Research on Xifangjingtubian Statue of Tang Dynasty Grotto in Sichuan.” Her Supervisor was Huang Zongxian. She was a visiting scholar at the University of Wisconsin-Madison from May 2015—May 2016. Her research interests include minority traditional dress and art history.

Alex Greene
PhD Student
French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and the University of French Guiana
Email: accidentalshrike@gmail.com

Alex Greene is a PhD student with the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and the University of French Guiana. His doctoral research, which has involved working with Hmong communities in French Guiana, France, the U.S. and Thailand, focuses on how plants are transported and exchanged between Hmong individuals and communities in the global diaspora. This project balances ethnobotanical, geographical and anthropological perspectives to question the role played by the exchange of agricultural plants and tshuaj ntsuab in the continuity, transformation and resilience of cultural identity, traditional practices, and family networks. He dreams of helping to curate a comprehensive guidebook to Tshuaj Hmoob and is actively seeking collaborators for this project.

Jacob R. Hickman
Department of Anthropology, Brigham Young University (anthropology.byu.edu)
Email: jhickman@byu.edu
Website: jacobrhickman.org

Jacob R. Hickman is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Brigham Young University, where he specializes in psychological anthropology, cultural psychology, and Southeast Asian studies. He has conducted over 40 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Hmong communities in Thailand, Vietnam, China, France, Alaska, Wisconsin, and Minnesota since 2004. His current research interests include understanding how Hmong communities, ritual practice, morality and ethics, family life, and subjectivities have changed at various points in the global diaspora. In particular, Jacob seeks to understand how social life in these various countries and communities where Hmong have migrated affect these various elements of Hmong social life. One of Jacob’s current project involves understanding new religious movements in the Hmong diaspora, including a variety of millenarian movements and various attempts to establish a universal, standardized form of Hmong religious rites.

Paul Hillmer
PhD (University of Minnesota)
Professor of History, Concordia University, St. Paul, MN
E-mail: hillmer@csp.edu

Paul Hillmer is a Professor of History at Concordia University in St. Paul, MN. He is the director of the Hmong Oral History Project, which began simply as a way to help his Hmong students interview family elders to learn their own history. After collecting more than 200 interviews, he was awarded a History Channel grant to create a documentary about the Hmong resettlement in the Twin Cities (“From Strangers to Neighbors”) and authored A People’s History of the Hmong (2010). While he is currently writing a monograph outside of Hmong Studies, his current research interests in the field relate to US and Thai support of Hmong postwar anti-communist activity, political factionalism in the Hmong diaspora, Hmong and Lao veterans’ commemoration of their military service, and depictions of the Hmong in the US media.

Alexander Hopp
PhD Student in History
University of Minnesota-Twin Cities

Email: hopp0104@umn.edu

Alexander Hopp is a PhD student at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. He completed his MA in Southeast Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where his research focused on the impact of the possessive investment in whiteness on Hmong and Khmer refugee resettlement in the United States. Currently, his research falls broadly into categories of critical refugee studies, Hmong studies, and Asian American history. His dissertation project seeks to understand contested meanings of statelessness, home, and homeland within the Hmong diaspora by chronicling an extended history of Hmong refugee resettlement in the United States. In doing so, he hopes to center Hmong epistemology in order to illustrate how the racialized and heteropatriarchal structures of US imperialism and the Hmong American response to them shaped and continue to shape the Hmong diaspora, particularly in Southeast Asia.

Ray Hutchison
PhD (University of Chicago)
Professor, Department of Sociology and Director of the Hmong Studies Center, UW-Green Bay
E-mail: hutchr@uwgb.edu

Ray Hutchison is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Hmong Studies Center at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay. His completed his undergraduate degree at from SUNY-Binghamton (BA in Sociology) and was a NIMH Research Fellow at the University of Chicago (MA, Phd in Sociology). Dr. Hutchison is Series Editor of Research in Urban Sociology (now in the 15th volume from Emerald Press), editor of the Encyclopedia of Urban Studies (SAGE Publications), and co-author of The New Urban Sociology (now in the 5th Edition from Westview Press). He is the author of an early study of the Green Bay Hmong Community (Acculturation in the Hmong Community) and co-author of Early Marriage in a Hmong Cohort from a longitudinal study of Hmong students in the St. Paul public schools. The Hmong Studies Center at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay was established in 2007 to oversee course offerings in Hmong Studies, present a lecture series to the university community, and to coordinate undergraduate research on topics of importance to the Hmong community. This work brings him full circle to his earlier interests in immigration and ethnic communities (beginning with studies of Mexican immigration to Chicago in The Historiography of Chicago’s Mexican Community and other publications) that have been neglected for too long a time.

Thérèse Moua Jasperson
PhD Candidate, Second Language Acquisition, UW Madison
Email: mjasperson2@wisc.edu

Thérèse Moua Jasperson is a PhD candidate at UW Madison in the Second Language Acquisition program. After receiving her master’s degree in Language, Literacy, and Culture from Stanford University, Thérèse worked as a Hmong language consultant for several Hmong bilingual education programs in California, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. This experience led her to explore the appropriateness of aligning Hmong language standards to the Common Core State Standards. Her research interests revolve around valuing the unique linguistic features of a language and how culture affects its language repertoire.  She focuses on the acquisition of a second language that is grounded in oral traditions versus literacy, and how Hmong children literature narratives (dab neeg Hmoob) are constructed regarding syntax and semiotics.

William Johnston
PhD Candidate, Department of Linguistics, McGill University
Email: william.johnston4@mail.mcgill.ca
Website: https://williamjohnston.github.io/

William Johnston is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Linguistics at McGill University. His research focuses on syntax (sentence structure) and semantics (meaning). He has primarily studied English and Hmong, with a secondary focus on comparisons with other languages. His dissertation uses linguistic fieldwork methods (specialized interviews with native speakers) to investigate the grammar of verbs in Hmong, particularly the relationship between the structure of multi-verb sentences and the kinds of events that they describe. By comparing data from Hmong with existing studies of other languages, this helps to chip away at one of the central research questions in linguistics: in what ways must languages be similar to one another, and in what ways can they differ?

Mai Na Lee
PhD (UW-Madison)
Associate Professor, Department of History, and
Asian American Studies Program, U. Minnesota
Email: mainalee@umn.edu

Mai Na M. Lee was born in the village of Pha Nok Kok, in the sub-district of Muang Pha, Xieng Khouang, Laos. In 1979, she trekked through the jungle for 28 days with her family to the Mekong River and swam across it to Thailand to become a permanent exile. She came to the United States in 1980, attended Carleton College as a Cowling Scholar and graduated in 1994 with a major in East Asian History and a Women’s Studies Concentration in US Women’s History. She obtained as PhD from the University of Wisconsin—Madison, specializing in Southeast Asian History. She is author of, Dreams of the Hmong Kingdom (UW Press, 2015), which explores how the Hmong, infused with “dreams” and aspirations of their own, negotiates for autonomy within various empires and states during the colonial era. She is currently Associate Professor of History and Asian American Studies at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. She teaches courses on Southeast Asia, the Vietnam Wars, Hmong global history, and on Hmong Americans. She continues to collect the oral histories of the Hmong around the globe, exploring topics about gender and cultural changes, Christian conversion, nationalist movements and aspirations, politics in the Lao state pre and post 1975, and transnational contacts between Hmong Americans and Hmong in Asia.

Moh Lee
PhD Student, Department of Sociology, University of Minnesota Twin-Cities
Email: Lee02941@umn.edu

Moh Lee is a PhD student in sociology at the University of Minnesota Twin-Cities. She completed her Master of Science in Education in Educational Psychology at Northern Illinois University, where she studied how the recent Hmong refugee parents from Wat Thamkrabok, Thailand support their adolescent children through higher education. Her broad research interests include critical refugee studies and critical Hmong studies. She is interested in researching how war traumas extend beyond time and space, and how these collective traumas can be transferred to the next generations. She seeks to understand what healing means for refugees, especially those with significant loss such as death of loved ones, assets, and social status during warfare. Moh is especially interested in studying how refugee women play a role in building and rebuilding communities post-wars and how the intersection of their various identities (e.g., Hmong, woman, refugee) shape how they find belongings and form support groups in a patriarchal society.

Email: tousaikolee@gmail.com

Tou SaiKo Lee is a Public Speaker, Hip Hop Artist, Storyteller, and Spoken Word Poet. Lee is a graduate student in the Southeast Asian Studies M.A. at UW Madison. His research is focused on “indigeneity” of Hmong identity in Southeast Asia and revitalization of Hmong culture and language through artistic approaches. Lee received the Bush Foundation Leadership Fellowship in 2016 to focus on research of the Hmong diaspora including communities in Vietnam, Australia, China and Thailand of how Hmong use traditional arts as ways to preserve culture. Tou SaiK was selected by TEDx Talks for his presentation titled “Reclaiming cultural identity and language through hip hop” on YouTube in 2021.

Prasit Leepreecha
PhD (University of Washington)
Lecturer, Faculty of Social Science, Chiang Mai University
Email: prasit.lee@cmu.ac.th

Prasit Leepreecha (TsavTxhiaj Lis) received his doctoral degree in Cultural Anthropology from University of Washington, in Seattle. Presently, he is a lecturer at Department of Social Science and Development, Faculty of Social Science, Chiang Mai University. He and other colleagues also run the Center for Ethnic Studies and Development at Chiang Mai University. His interest includes indigenous and ethnic movements in responding to nationalism and globalization impacts.

Lori Kido Lopez
PhD (University of Southern California)
Professor, Associate Professor of Communication Arts, Department of Communication Arts UW-Madison
Email: lklopez@wisc.edu

Lori Kido Lopez is an Associate Professor of Media and Cultural Studies in the Department of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is also affiliated with the Asian American Studies Program. Her research explores the ways that minority communities use media in the fight for social justice. Since moving to Madison, she has begun to study the communication patterns of Hmong Americans, focusing on the development of radio and other forms of broadcast media to create transnational communities. She is also interested in using a community-based participatory research framework to explore the way that Hmong community organizations utilize storytelling networks in their advocacy work.

Maichou Lor
Assistant Professor in the School of Nursing at UW-Madison
Email: mlor2@wisc.edu

Dr. Maichou Lor’s research focuses on reducing health disparities through improving health communication between health care providers and patients, specifically patients with low health literacy and/or have limited English proficiency, beginning with the Hmong population. Dr. Lor’s research interests include examining the role and impact of interpreters in health care settings, examining how culture and language influence health communication, developing/evaluating information visualizations (infographics) to facilitate communication in health care settings, and improving recruitment methodologies for vulnerable populations.

Pao Lor
PhD (UW-Madison)
Professor, Associate Professor, Professional Program in Education UW-Green Bay
Email: lorp@uwgb.edu

Pao Lor is an associate professor in the Professional Program in Education at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay where he teaches courses in teacher preparation, English education, middle level education, culturally responsive teaching, politics of education, foundations of curriculum and supervision of instruction. His research focuses on a variety topics about the Hmong-American experience including Hmong college students, Hmong teachers, leadership and women. Pao was born in Laos and has been in the United states since 1980. Prior to joining the Professional Program in Education at UW-Green Bay, Pao was a school administrator, middle/high school communication arts teacher, high school and college soccer head coach and academic advisor.

Chong Moua
PhD Student, Department of History, UW-Madison
Email: cmoua3@wisc.edu

Chong Moua is a PhD student in the history department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She was the last of her siblings to be born in Laos and came to the United States with her family as refugees in 1989. She is interested in how Hmong people create Hmong subjects through the production of cultural artifacts such as oral histories passed down, writing, literature, art, and political and social organizations. Her recently completed master’s thesis, “Writing Into Being: Constructing the Hmong Subject in Kao Kalia Yang’s ‘The Latehomecomer'”, explored the ways in which Yang, a Hmong American woman, constructs a female Hmong subject through the technology of a family memoir centering around the life of her paternal grandmother. Yang’s creation of a female Hmong subject served to counter a Hmong subject that, through history and recent events that made regional and national headline in the American media, pathologized “Hmong” as “male” and “militant.” Chong plans to continue her research by looking at how the Hmong subject can be used as a case study to explore how the figure of the refugee, with its ambiguous social and political position, can expand our understandings of statelessness and the processes of belonging and citizenship.

Mitch Ogden
PhD (University of Minnesota)
Assistant Professor, Department of English and Philosophy, UW-Stout
Email: ogdenm@uwstout.edu

Mitch Ogden is interested in Hmong cultural production—especially literary publication, film/media production, and literacy practices—throughout the diaspora. He is interested in imagined constructions of diasporic homeland, the political and cultural complexities of Hmong orthographies, the transnational Hmong film microindustry, and the evolution of the Hmong American literary movement. In the context of refugee studies, he strives to reframe refugees as active cultural producers rather than perpetual victims. His dissertation offers a theoretical framework of refugee utopias: ambiguous and imagined non/places where refugee communities engage in cultural production. He is currently working on a digital humanities project to build an optical character recognition (OCR) tool for the Puaj Txwm alphabet that will facilitate the digitization of the sacred texts of the Is Npis Mis Nus millenarian movement.

Margiana Petersen-Rockney
PhD (University of California Berkeley)
Visiting Postdoctoral Fellow, Harvard University
Email: margiana@berkeley.edu

Margiana Petersen-Rockney is a political ecologist who studies climate equity and agrarian change. Margiana’s research examines adaptive capacity in working landscapes; agricultural responses to environmental change; and water and land use policy and racial equity in a changing climate. Margiana received her PhD from UC Berkeley’s Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management where she was a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow. She is currently a Postdoctoral Researcher in UC Berkeley and a Visiting Postdoc Fellow at Harvard University’s History of Science Department. One of her current research projects focuses on environmental and equity outcomes of local-level regulatory control of cannabis cultivation in California. Through that work, Margiana has been building relationships with Hmong farmers who grow crops that include cannabis. Next, Margiana will be leading a community-engaged project with Hmong farmers that will examine 1) agrarian diasporas and migrations; 2) medical cannabis practices and uses; 3) interactions with criminal justice systems, especially environmentally justified enforcement; and 4) labor and livelihood strategies.

Kong Pheng Pha
PhD (University of Minnesota)
Assistant Professor of Critical Hmong Studies and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire
Email: phakp@uwec.edu
Website: kongphengpha.com

Kong Pheng Pha’s research uses critical race, feminist, and queer theories to examine the racial, gendered, and queer dimensions of Hmong social and political life in the U.S. He is currently working on two book projects, the first project examines the constructions of race, gender, sexuality, and queerness in the Hmong diaspora and its implication on “Hmong culture.” The second project is a collection of activist essays that explores what it means to be Hmong American in an increasingly polarized, politicized, and revolutionary world. Both projects seeks to theorize the Hmong American condition in the diaspora. His research, writing, and teaching are all informed by his experience working with different community collectives around issues such as queer justice, Black Lives Matter, and student civic engagement.

Seb Rumsby PhD
Researcher, University of Warwick
Email: Seb.Rumsby@warwick.ac.uk

Dr Seb Rumsby is an early career researcher at University of Warwick, UK. His PhD thesis explored the everyday politics of mass Christian conversion among the Hmong in Vietnam, which involved several months of fieldwork among Hmong-inhabited areas of Vietnam. He has also studied Hmong millenarian movements in South East Asia, and is co-founder of Hmongdom – an innovative rural development initiative.

Yutthapong Seubsakwong
PhD Student, International Program in Social Science, Faculty of Social Sciences, Chiang Mai University
seubsakwong@wisc.edu

Yutthapong’s main cultural and social study focus is on Hmong in heterogeneous dimensions and based in Thailand, where he was born in a Hmong community in Phetchabun Province. His major interest is heterogeneous environments of politics, which influence the social evolution of Hmong society through time-space condition of globalization and modernity; in the Thailand context, state policy and civil discourses are the main factors influencing the conditions related to the processes of territorialization and deterritorialization of social organisms, which affect the everyday lives of the members, the Hmong. With this intension, his work is mainly based on the theory of space, discourse and assemblage and the main methodology used relates to social analysis in Hmong studies.

Bret Shaw (Ph.D., UW-Madison)
Department of Life Sciences Communication and Division of Extension, UW-Madison
Email: brshaw@wisc.edu

Bret Shaw is a Professor in the Department of Life Sciences Communication and an Environmental Communication Specialist for the Division of Extension at UW-Madison.  He focuses on strategic and culturally relevant science communication to support conservation, health, and agriculture.  He is working on a USDA-funded initiative to support Hmong farmers in Wisconsin and is facilitating development of social and other digital media for this project.  He is seeking partnerships to provide culturally relevant resources for Hmong farmers and writing future grants to continue this project.

Tian Shi, Ph.D. (KU Leuven, Belgium), lecturer of Overseas Chinese, College of Overseas Chinese, Wenzhou University, China. E-mail: 20220337@wzu.edu.cn

Tian Shi is a Lecturer at the College of Overseas Chinese at Wenzhou University, China. She earned her Ph.D. in anthropology from KU Leuven in Belgium. Her research encompasses migration, refugee resettlement, ethnic identity, and the Hmong diaspora. Specifically, her doctoral study examined the Hmong community in Europe, focusing on their efforts to maintain cultural identity while navigating conviviality within a European context. Her dissertation explored the significant impact of emotional and intimacy capital in the daily lives of ethnic refugees through kin-network support, highlighting its role in providing psychological relief, overcoming challenges, and fostering a sense of community amid integration policies.

Since graduating from KU Leuven, Tian Shi has broadened her research to explore Hmong communities in Southeast Asian countries, investigating how these communities leverage both traditional clan systems and contemporary entrepreneurial practices to improve their economic status and cultural engagement across borders. This research enhances our understanding of the roles minority groups play in both global and regional development.

Wan Shun
PhD Student（Chinese Academy of Social Sciences）, Part-time researcher at the Center for International Miao/Hmong Studies of Southwest University
Email: swan9@wisc.edu or loveneuq@163.com

Wan Shun, who is himself part Hmong, is a PhD Student majoring in anthropology. His research interests include overseas Chinese studies, Hmong studies, cultural changes, minority identity studies and minority traditional dress. He has conducted research in the United States, Laos, and Thailand. He is currently regarding the lifestyles and identities of Hmong Americans.

Bailey B. Smolarek (she/her)
PHD in Curriculum and Instruction
Researcher, the Wisconsin Center for Education Research and Teaching Faculty, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Email: bsmolarek@wisc.edu

Bailey B. Smolarek (she/her) holds a PhD in Curriculum and Instruction and is a Researcher at the Wisconsin Center for Education Research and Teaching Faculty in the Department of Education Policy Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She uses critical, decolonial, and feminist theories to explore the experiences of historically marginalized and/or excluded populations in secondary and postsecondary educational contexts in the United States. She is the co-PI of the Our HMoob American College Paj Ntaub project, an NSF-funded participatory action research study that examines the college experiences of HMoob students in Wisconsin, and is one of the founders and lead researchers of the Student Engaged Participatory Action Research Center (SEPARC). Prior to receiving her PhD, Bailey taught secondary and postsecondary Spanish and English as a Second Language courses in the U.S. and abroad. Her work has been published in the International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, Journal of Education Policy, American Educational Research Journal, Race, Ethnicity & Education, The Journal of Higher Education, and Action Research.

Hooi Ling Soh
PhD (MIT, Linguistics)
Professor, Institute of Linguistics, University of Minnesota
Email: sohxx001@umn.edu

Hooi Ling Soh is a Professor in the Institute of Linguistics at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. Her research interests include topics in syntax (sentence structure) and semantics (meaning) and how they interact, with the broad goal of determining how human languages are the same and how they may vary. Her research has focused on languages spoken in Southeast Asia. In recent years, she has begun work on the syntax and semantics of discourse particles in Mandarin Chinese, Malay, English and most recently in Hmong (on the discourse particle li). She is involved in community-engaged linguistic scholarship. She currently organizes an online research and reading group on Hmong linguistics, providing a space for linguistic faculty and students, Hmong language teachers and community members across the country to connect and learn from one another. She is also working on building an open access annotated corpus of the Hmong language that supports linguistic research and the teaching and learning of the Hmong language.

Lynet Uttal
PhD (University of California, Santa Cruz)
Emeritus Professor, Chican@ & Latin@ Studies Program, University of Wisconsin, Madison

Clinical social Worker, Journey Mental Health

Email: lynet.uttal@gmail.com

Lynet Uttal is a retired professor from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She taught about the Hmong experience in her courses on immigrant families and racial ethnic families. She supervised theses on Hmong American topics, including family, immigration adaptation, biculturalism and health. In her community based research courses, students regularly engaged in university-community projects with Hmong in Madison, Wisconsin. As the past director of Asian American Studies at UW-Madison from 2008-2013, she advocated for Hmong American  Studies, including increasing the number of Hmong students  getting an Asian American Studies certificate, supporting Hmong American student organizations, organizing over 30 lectures about Hmong Americans, hiring visiting assistant professors in Hmong American Studies, and chairing the joint university-community-student committee that hired a tenure track professor in Hmong American Studies. She promoted a bridge between the university and community to advance the field of Hmong American Studies and encouraging the professional development of Hmong graduate students and assistant professors. She is now a practicing therapist and continues to support the development of the Hmong community as well as work with individuals to promote their well-being.

Kevin K. Thao
Resident Physician, Primary Care Research Fellow, Department of Family Medicine. UW-Madison
Email: Kevin.Thao@fammed.wisc.edu

Kevin Koobmoov Thao is a Family Medicine Resident and Primary Care Research Fellow in the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Department of Family Medicine. His research interests include investigating the impact of chronic diseases such as diabetes, hypertension, and coronary artery disease in the Hmong communities of Wisconsin. His Masters theses entitled “The Prevalence of Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus in a Wisconsin Hmong Patient Population.” It revealed a high prevalence of diabetes amongst a Hmong patient population. His current community based participatory research project, The Wausau Area Hmong Community Health Improvement Project (WAHCHIP). It will focus on building a robust Hmong Health Coalition in central Wisconsin to identify and address the key health issues of the Central Wisconsin Hmong Community.

Mai See Thao
PhD (University of Minnesota-Twin Cities), Postdoctoral, Medical College of Wisconsin
Assistant Professor, Anthropology Program, University of Wisconsin Oshkosh
Email: thaom@uwosh.edu

Mai See Thao is an assistant professor of anthropology and the director of Hmong Studies at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh. Her research interests are chronic illness, haunting, ethnic consciousness, and transnationalism. She received her PhD in Anthropology from the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, where her dissertation examined the experiences of type 2 diabetic Hmong-Americans as they are shaped by the specter of the Homeland. Rather than the biomedical narratives of diet and exercise, Mai See explores the materialization and transubstantiation of the Homeland within everyday diabetic experiences, transnational medical consumption, and return migrations to Laos and Thailand by diabetic Hmong-Americans. Her overall goal is to understand how claims to health, life and death are tied up with notions of sovereignty.

Pa Thor
PhD Student,  Social Work, New York University

Pa Thor is a Ph.D. Social Work student at New York University. Her research focus includes topics related to gender-based violence, family violence and relationships, community-based interventions, gun violence, and forensic social work. Pa aims to study marginalized and ethnic minority populations along with the social structures and institutions surrounding these groups. Pa’s current research project seeks to understand Hmong murder-suicides by examining any microlevel and macrolevel factors associated with these acts of violence. Her research interests were influenced by her prior work with Hmong families in child welfare and previous service as a board member for Merced Lao Family Community of Merced, CA.

Giac-Thao (Alisia) Tran
PhD (University of Minnesota)
Assistant Professor, Counseling and Counseling Psychology, College of Letters and Sciences, Arizona State University
Email: alisia@asu.edu

Alisia (Giac-Thao) Tran is an Assistant Professor in the Counseling and Counseling Psychology program at Arizona State University’s School of Letters and Sciences. She heads the Tran Ethnic and Minority Psychology and Experiences (TEMPE) Lab. Her broad research interests are in minority equity, mental health, and development. Her current emerging research focus is on financial disparities and contributory financial literacy, decision-making, and behaviors. Other research foci include discrimination, ethnic-racial or cultural socialization, and ethnic minority psychology. Her research draws on methodological approaches from Counseling Psychology, Social Psychology, Cognitive Psychology, and Public Health. Her clinical interests are in pediatric neuropsychology and psychology. Her advocacy work is based in local and national Asian American communities/organizations, as well as in APA Division 17 (Society for Counseling Psychology). She completed her doctoral training and clinical internship at the University of Minnesota.

Pa Der Vang
PhD (University of Minnesota)
Associate Professor of Social Work, School of Social Work. University of St. Thomas
E-mail: pdvang@stkate.edu

Dr. Pa Der Vang is an associate professor of social work at the School of Social Work at St. Catherine University/University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, MN. She is also the coordinator of the Critical Hmong Studies Minor, a program she founded in 2012. The minor offers three Hmong language courses, Critical Hmong Studies, and Asian American Identities courses along with Foundations of Critical Studies of Race and Ethnicity.  Dr. Vang teaches the Critical Hmong Studies course. She is interested in the impact of traditional practices on Hmong as they adapt to life in the western world. She has several publications about Hmong women and teenage marriage, as well as acculturation and socioeconomic status.

Pashoua Vang
Graduate Student, International Educational Development Program
Teachers College, Columbia University
E-mail: pv2322@tc.columbia.edu

Zoua M. Vang, Ph.D.
Meta Schroeder Beckner Outreach Professor, Ecology of Healthy Communities,
Dept of Civil Society and Community Studies, School of Human Ecology | Integrated Specialist (Health Equity), Institute of Health & Well-Being, Division of Extension University of Wisconsin Madison
Email: zoua.vang@wisc.edu

Dr. Vang’s interdisciplinary research includes maternal and child health, international migration (including the healthy immigrant effect), Indigenous health, racism & discrimination as social determinants of wellness, and community-based approaches to health equity and cultural safety. She examines these issues in collaboration with underserved and marginalized populations such as immigrants/refugees, Indigenous communities, and racial/ethnic minorities in Canada and the United States. Trained as a mixed-method researcher, Dr. Vang employs both qualitative and quantitative methodologies, and community-based participatory research frameworks in her projects.

Pao Vue
PhD (UW-Madison)
Department of Agriculture, Iowa
Email: pdvue@wisc.edu

Pao Vue works for the Department of Agriculture in Iowa. His research interest is in indigenous knowledge, community-based wildlife conservation and natural resource management in Southeast Asia. He received his PhD in Geography, minor in Conservation Biology and Sustainable Development, from the University of Wisconsin-Madison; Master of Science in Environmental Science & Policy with emphasis on ecosystems studies from the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay; and a Bachelor of Arts in Zoology and Biological Aspects of Conservation from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Matthew Wolfgram
PhD (University of Michigan)
Researcher, Wisconsin Center for Education Research, University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Email: mswolfgram@wisc.edu
Website: https://www.wcer.wisc.edu/About/Staff/1544

Matthew Wolfgram is an anthropologist of education and education researcher at the Wisconsin Center for Education Research. His research employs ethnography, participatory action research, and other qualitative research methods to study factors that impact the educational experiences of minoritized college students. He is the co-PI of the “Our HMoob American College Paj Ntaub,” an NSF-funded participatory action research study that examines the college experiences of HMoob students in Wisconsin, and is one of the founders and lead researchers of the Student Engaged Participatory Action Research Center (SEPARC). This study cultivates authentic, engaged partnerships with Hmong American students, scholars, and communities, and centers the knowledge and voices of those impacted by systemic racism within STEM pathways. His recent publications are featured in New Directions for Higher Education, International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, Harvard Education Review, Teachers College Record, AERA Open, Journal of Education and Work, Action Research, and Anthropology & Education Quarterly.

Huang Xiurong
PhD (Minzu University of China)
Associate Professor of Anthropology, History and Culture Institute, Southwest University.
Email: hxrjaime@swu.edu.cn

Huang Xiurong is associate professor in Southwest University. Her research covers a wide variety of topics, including traditional rituals and the social organization of ethnic minorities in China, gender, cultural change, and cultural identity. Her most recent research focus has been on Transnational Miao/Hmong studies, including their migration/diaspora in the past, their ethnic and cultural identities, their languages and cultures, their economic development, their social gender problems, and so on.

Bao Xiong
Graduate Student, Center for Southeast Asian Studies, UW-Madison
E-mail: baoxiong@gmail.com

Bao Xiong is an MA student at the Center for Southeast Asian Studies in UW-Madison. Her family was one of the last waves of Hmong refugees to arrive in the United States in 2004. She is the first of her siblings to attend graduate school. Bao finished her undergraduate education in Anthropology from UC Merced in 2017. She is interested in the relationship between Hmong Americans and Hmong residing in Southeast Asia, particularly Thailand and Laos. Bao seeks to understand the reasons behind cross-border marriages between young Hmong Southeast Asians girls and older Hmong American men. She is also interested in the Hmong marriage systems, patterns of gender roles in Hmong patrilineal society, and the effects of polygamy on Hmong family members.

PhD Student, Department of Anthropology, UW-Madison
Email: cxiong8@wisc.edu

Choua Xiong is a graduate student pursing a joint degree in Cultural Anthropology and Educational Policy Studies. She is broadly interested in how educational discourses shapes and influences Hmong people’s national, ethnic, and racial identities. She worked on numerous projects on racial and gender identity of Hmong-Americans in the Midwest. In 2012, Choua went to Yunnan Province, China, on a project funded by the Freeman ASIANetwork Fellowship, to explore the history of Chi You the mythical Hmong king. This China Hmong History project broadens her scope on understanding how education (formal and in-formal) influences how Hmong communities make meaning of their national and ethnic identities transnationally. Her current research will draw on Hmong people’s educational experiences in Laos and Thailand to further explore this interest.

Masaya Xiong
Email: MXiong27@madisoncollege.edu

Masaya Xiong has worked in higher education for over 10 years serving students in a variety of capacity including career & employment and college access advising. She earned her undergraduate degree in social work at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater and a master’s in Administrative Leadership in Higher Education at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Masaya is passionate about the Hmong American student experience in Higher Education.

Currently she serves as a Community Engagement Coordinator at Madison College with a focus on the Hmong & Asian communities. Along with her Community Engagement colleagues, their purpose is to actively seek and engage by listening and understanding the challenges, gaps, successes, and priorities that exist within their respective community. Feedback generated from these engagement efforts can assist Madison College in strengthening community ties and partners, improving its services and resources, and positively impact student success outcomes.

Urai Yangcheepsutjarit
Lecturer, Faculty of Social Science, Chiang Mai University
Email: urai.2530@hotmail.com

Urai Yangcheepsutjarit is a Thai Hmong. The word “Yang” in the beginning of her surname signifies that she belongs to the Yang clan. She was brought to a Thai school to study when she was young. There, she started to learn about Thailand and Thai ways but this also kept her away her Hmong culture. She acquired knowledge of English from Calcutta University in India, where she completed her undergraduate degree. She then turned to studying her own people, after joining the Ethnicity and Development Program at the Faculty of Social Science, at Chiang Mai University, where she worked with Dr. Prasit Leepracha. She conducted her Master’s research regarding constructing and contesting social memories in former communist Hmong communities in Chiang Rai Province, northern Thailand.

Lan Yongshi
PhD Student, School of Ethnology and Sociology, Minzu University of China
Email: lanyongshigx@163.com

Lan Yongshi is a PhD student majoring in anthropology in Minzu University of China. Her supervisor is Jia Zhongyi. Her research interests include cultural change, social gender, agency and self-developing ability of ethnic minorities, multi-culture and ethnic relations. Being part Yao and part Zhuang, she has a special bond with the Miao (Hmong). After seven-month field work in Shidong Town, Taijiang County, Guizhou Province in China, she has done her research on “Gender Culture of Fangnan Miao Society: a case study of the Sisters Festival.” Now her doctoral dissertation focus on the Hmong people in Wisconsin and Minnesota.

Weidong Zhang
PhD (University of Iowa)
Associate Professor, Global Studies and World Languages Department, Winona State University
Email: WZhang@winona.edu

Weidong Zhang, associate professor in Global Studies and World Languages Department at Winona State University, Minnesota, USA. He holds a PhD in Mass Communications, with a cultural studies focus, and an MA degree in Asian Studies/Asian Civilizations, both from the University of Iowa. His research interests lie at the intersection of language, media, culture, and society. One important line of his scholarship is ethnicity and cultural identity in the era of globalization. He spent one year at Max PIanck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Goettingen, Germany as a research fellow during 2014-2015, and worked on a project, Hmong diaspora, ancestral land, and transnational networks. Currently he is working on new religious dynamics in Hmong American community.