About

My name is Donna Doan Anderson (she/her) and I am a sixth-year Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara. My research engages with Asian and Asian American communities in the U.S. Midwest from the late 19th to mid-20th centuries and the intersections of immigration and land policy.

My commitment to sharing the diverse stories of the Midwest is rooted in my experience as a mixed-raced Vietnamese American growing up in Omaha, Nebraska and my career as a high school history teacher in Lincoln, Nebraska. While teaching, I struggled to find materials that adequately reflected the experience of my own upbringing and my students, who represented over thirty nationalities and spoke fifty different languages. For many, the Midwest does not evoke images of diversity and culture, which perpetuates coastal narratives in both U.S. History and Asian American studies scholarship. My hope is to support the current works that argue against the myth of the Midwest as local, isolated, insulated, and traditional and for my research to provide a more nuanced engagement with Asian American communities that reside there. 

In addition to my research, I serve as Assistant Editor for the Journal of Asian American Studies and am heavily involved in the Asian American activist community at UCSB. I also recently became a co-host of the New Books Network in Asian American Studies podcast.

Thank you for taking the time to visit my site! I gladly accept any questions or inquiries about my research.