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Southeast Asian Archive Anne Frank Visiting Researcher Award

The UC Irvine Libraries is pleased to offer an award of $500 to one individual to use the research collections in the Southeast Asian Archive, part of the UC Irvine Libraries Special Collections and Archives.

The award is intended for a researcher who lives outside of Orange County and is not affiliated with UC Irvine.  Faculty, students, and independent researchers (including film makers, scriptwriters, playwrights, biographers, novelists, and other writers) are encouraged to apply.  The $500 award is intended to defray expenses for traveling to Irvine and conducting research in the Southeast Asian Archive.  Funds will be distributed in two installments--before and after the completion of the research project. 

The call for applications will be posted at this website 5-6 weeks before the deadline, which will be in late April or early May.  The decision will be announced two weeks later.  Applications will be judged according to the relevance of the proposal to the holdings of the Southeast Asian Archive, the proposed outcome of the research, and the qualifications of the applicant.  The research should be conducted at UC Irvine between June and the following March.  Shortly after visiting the Southeast Asian Archive, the recipient must provide a one-page statement of his or her research findings, which may be edited and used in the UC Irvine Libraries' publications.

This award is in honor of Anne Frank, the librarian who founded the Southeast Asian Archive, who retired in 2007. A generous gift from an anonymous donor has made this annual award possible.

2013-2014 Recipient
Previous Recipients

Chong A. Moua

Chong A. Moua, a doctoral candidate in U.S. History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is this year's recipient.

Her research project (and dissertation title), "Refugee Cosmopolitanism: Hmong Refugeeism and Critical Statelessness," impressed the review panel with its approach to a less-studied Southeast Asian refugee community. Ms. Moua describes her work as "[analyzing] the ways in which Hmong refugees upend the discourse of the United States as a nation of refuge for displaced immigrants." She adds, "Historically stateless, the Hmong provide a fitting case study to interrogate the issues of belonging, refugeeism, and their relationship to the nation-state."

She plans to work with the Southeast Asian Archive's collections during summer 2013, at which time this brief announcement will be updated and include a photo of her in the SEAA reading room.