Hongyan Yang
Visiting Assistant Professor in History / Core Fellow
Department
Biography
Hongyan Yang (杨鸿雁) is a Core Fellow/Visiting Assistant Professor in History, (Digital) Humanities, Comparative Migration and Ethnic Studies. Trained as an urban planner, cultural geographer, and architectural historian, her interdisciplinary research considers the underexplored spatial and material dimensions of Asian American experiences. Intellectually invested in ethnic foodways and immigration history, she explores how Asian immigrants’ culinary traditions, cultural sensibilities, and complex identities invest new meanings to the cultural landscapes in the United States. She is currently working on several research projects, including her first book manuscript Landscapes of Resistance: Chinese Placemaking across the Pacific, a museum project that documents the contributions of American architects of Chinese descent in collaboration with the Society of Architectural Historians and the Copper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, and an oral history project, “Places of Their Own,” funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and Oral History Association. In addition to her research, she has developed community-centered teaching in Asian and Asian American architecture, as well as professional practices in historic preservation. She is the recipient of several awards, including the Sophie Coe Prize Honorable Mention, the Vernacular Architecture Forum Ambassadors Award, and the American Pacific Coast Geographers Committee Award for Excellence in Area Studies. Her recent work is featured in American Chinese Restaurants (2020) and Routledge Handbook of Food in Asia (2019). She holds a Ph.D. in Architecture in the Buildings-Landscapes-Cultures Program from the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee.