Transpacific Studies: Framing an Emerging Field

Janet Hoskins is professor of anthropology at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, USA. She is the author of The Play of Time: Kodi Perspectives on Calendars, History and Exchange (University of California Press 1994, winner of the 1996 Benda Prize for Southeast Asian Studies), Biographical Objects: How Things Tell the Story of People's Lives (Routledge, 1998), and is the contributing editor of Headhunting and the Social Imagination in Southeast Asia (Stanford, 1996), Anthropology as a Search for the Subject: The Space Between One Self and Another (Donizelli, 1999), and Fragments from Forests and Libraries (Carolina Academic Press 2000). Her book The Divine Eye and the Diaspora: Vietnamese Syncretism Becomes Transpacific Caodaism will be published in 2015. Viet Thanh Nguyen is an associate professor of English and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California, USA. He is the author of Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America (Oxford University Press, 2002). He has held residencies, fellowships and scholarships at the Fine Arts Work Center, the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and the American Council of Learned Societies. He is currently working on a comparative study of American and Vietnamese memories and representations of the American War in Viet Nam, focusing on the literary and visual arts.