Communities of Refuge

My forthcoming manuscript focuses on Southeast Asian/American political identity formation in the US Southeast by tracing the histories and movements of North Carolina’s Hmong and Montagnard communities. I focus on how these communities organized themselves outside of the state apparatus in order to de-emphasize what Yamashita (2022) so cogently refers to as quiet neglect, through which the prevailing narrative of national benevolence toward refugees is employed to overshadow US intervention in Southeast Asia in the 1950s-1970s. I then follow the lineage of these communities to panethnic Southeast Asian youth solidarity work.

Linguistics

In the field of linguistics, my research focuses on languages of mainland Southeast Asia, usually in Cambodia and Vietnam. In my dissertation, I analyzed words known as sesquisyllables in Khmer, Bunong (or Mnong or Phnong) and Burmese. I provided acoustic evidence that these words, which are supposedly one-and-a-half syllables in length, are in fact all either monosyllabic or disyllabic. I argue that this evidence can be used to critique the cold-war notion of world regions more generally.

I am currently working on a description of diphthongs and triphthongs in Khmer and aspirationally working on a sociophonetic study of tone production in Hmong among mother-daughter pairs, inspired by Thepboriruk (2015).