History Welcomes New Faculty: Professor Jilene Chua
The History Department is excited to announce that Jilene Chua will be joining our faculty as Assistant Professor of History!
Jilene Chua is a socio-cultural legal historian of US race and empire, focusing on the Philippines. She was born in Manila—the capital city of the Philippines—and largely grew up in Richland, Washington. Her current project investigates how Chinese migrants troubled US empire in the Philippines in the first half of the twentieth century. In response to scholarship that has predominantly emphasized the Philippines as a US colony, she argues that the Philippines were also part of vibrant and longstanding Southeast Asian networks which complicated and, sometimes, undermined US colonial governance. This research has benefitted from her background as a Philippine Hokkien speaker; time she spent re-learning Tagalog at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Southeast Asian Studies Summer Institute (SEASSI); and from being a Visiting Researcher at the Center for Southeast Asian Studies in Kyoto University (Japan) and at the Ateneo de Manila University (Philippines). Her project has also received support from the Fulbright Program, the American Society for Legal History, the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, among others. This June, she will complete her PhD in History from Johns Hopkins University. At BU, she will teach courses related to Asian American history, the Philippines, and comparative racial regimes.
This fall, Professor Chua will be teaching HI 372: Power and Pleasure in Asian America and HI 400 B1: Topics in History (Paper Children, Tiger Parents: Capitalism and Asian American Families).