Directors Stories

On this page, you can explore the experiences of people who have impacted the program in different ways. From speaking to the undergraduate college experience, to finding graduate student community, each person highlighted here comments on the diversity of MSU’s APIDA/A community and even on how the Midwest has shaped their experiences. The final section highlights directors over the history of the APA Studies program. Click through the videos and documents below to learn about their stories!

Sitara Thobani

Sitara Thobani is an Associate Professor in the Residential College in the Arts and Humanities at Michigan State University. Her research focuses on the critical intersections between postcolonial and diasporic South Asian visual and material cultures, and global formations of race, religion, gender and nation. Sitara’s first book, Indian Classical Dance and the Making of Postcolonial National Identities: Dancing on Empire’s Stage (Routledge 2017), examines how diasporic artistic practices serve as a critical site for the mutual constitution of deeply entangled Indian, diasporic and British national identities. She builds on this study in her current research, which explores the relationship between distinct nationalist projects in the transnational context. Her research has been published in Social Identities, Ethnic and Racial Studies, The Journal of Religion and Popular Culture, and South Asian Diaspora. Sitara holds a PhD in Social and Cultural Anthropology from the University of Oxford, an MA in Sociology and Equity Studies from OISE University of Toronto, and a BA in Anthropology and Asian Studies from the University of British Columbia. Prior to joining MSU in 2017, Sitara held teaching positions at the University of British Columbia and Simon Fraser University.

Naoko Wake

Naoko Wake is Professor of History and former Director of the Asian Pacific American Studies Program at Michigan State University. A historian of race, gender, sexuality, disability, and memory in the Pacific world, she has authored Private Practices: Harry Stack Sullivan, the Science of Homosexuality, and American Liberalism (Rutgers, 2011) and American Survivors: Trans-Pacific Memories of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (Cambridge, 2021). She has created the largest oral history collection of Asian American survivors of the 1945 atomic bombings in the world, housed in MSU’s Robert G. Vincent Voice Library and in the Densho Digital Repository in Seattle. Her current project concerns the histories of disability, archives, and literature in Asian America/Pacific Islands, which led her to guest edit “Special Issue: Asian American Disability” for the Journal of American Ethnic History (Spring 2024). Her work has been supported by the National Science Foundation, Association for Asian Studies, Oral History Association, The Huntington Library, Center for the United States and the Cold War at New York University, and Nagasaki National Peace Memorial Hall for the Atomic Bomb Victims. Born and raised in Japan, she enjoys reading, yoga, gardening, and cooking.