Hongyan Yang, Ph.D.
I am an interdisciplinary activist-scholar who centers the built environment in the research, teaching, and empowerment of marginalized communities in the United States. Broadly, my research explores the intersection of race, ethnicity, and space, and asks how Asian immigrants' identities and culinary practices shaped and were shaped by the spaces they designed and inhabited. My work is guided not only by historical methods but also by my engagement with local communities through field documentation, oral history, and preservation efforts.
Currently, I am a Core Fellow/Visiting Assistant Professor of History, (Digital) Humanities, Comparative Migration and Ethnic Studies at Boston College, where I am completing my first book Building Past Exclusion: Chinese Placemaking through Foodways, 1880-1950. This book draws primarily on architectural and culinary archives to explore how Chinese immigrants pursued foodways as an aspirational model to survive racial exclusion and achieve class mobility in California. I argue that foodways were not only a means for Chinese immigrants to contest the hierarchies of power embedded in their everyday spaces but also were the very locations where they retained cultural agency. As the first study that centers the built environment in the exploration of Chinese American history in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, my manuscript revises the prevailing “negative history” of the era by making intelligible the little-known everyday practices of Chinese immigrants and the agency they possessed in the spaces they inhabited and owned.
I received my Ph.D. in Architecture in the Buildings-Landscapes-Cultures Program from the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. My research has received support with fellowships and grants from the Oral History Association, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Vernacular Architecture Forum, and the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. I am also the recipient of the Sophie Coe Prize Honorable Mention in 2017, the Vernacular Architecture Forum Ambassadors Award in 2015, and the American Pacific Coast Geographers Committee Award for Excellence in Area Studies in 2012.