Contributors to Intersections
Issue 35


Tui Nicola Clery graduated with a Ph.D. in Pacific Studies from the University of Otago, Aotearoa/New Zealand in May 2013, where she is currently a research assistant and tutor. Her thesis is entitled 'The Art of Peace: Performative and Arts-based Peace Practices in Contemporary Fiji.' It explores how artists, activists and civil society organisations are using arts-based processes as tools for communicating messages of peace, and initiating dialogue within and between diverse communities. Tui's publications include 'Women's Collective Creativity - Playful and Transgressive Processes for Building Peace in Fiji,' in The Journal of Pacific Studies (2011) and 'Place, cultural identity and the consequences of change for the Korova "squatter" community,' in Livelihoods and Identity in Fiji, ed. R.T. Robertson, University of the South Pacific, 2006.

Pilapa Esara is presently Interim Chair and an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the College at Brockport, State University of New York. Her current research project centers upon issues of refugee resettlement and adaptation within the U.S. Her prior publications and past research have focused on topics of gender inequality, marriage, social change and economic development in Thailand. Recently, she contributed to the Thailand chapter of Southeast Asian Figures of Modernity (2013), edited by Barker, Harms and Lindquist. Her article, 'Moral Scrutiny, Marital Inequality: Cohabitation in Bangkok, Thailand,' was published in the Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology (2012). In 2012, her ethnographic documentary, Day In, Day Out: Selling Food in Bangkok, was screened at a variety of domestic venues from Philadelphia to New York City as well as internationally in Athens, Greece. Pilapa holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology, and an A.M. in American Civilization from Brown University.

Wenjia Liu is an assistant professor in Chinese in the Department of Foreign Languages at Hendrix College. She received her Ph.D. in East Asian Languages and Literatures at University of Oregon in 2010. Her research focuses on late-imperial Chinese fiction, especially female-authored fiction. She is also interested in gender studies and popular culture.
Jennifer Ung Loh is a postdoctoral researcher specialising in gender and sexuality in India. She was awarded her Ph.D. from SOAS, University of London in 2014, on the political participation and election of hijras and kinnars in Madhya Pradesh. Her research interests include the construction of gender and sexual roles in contemporary India, local political practice, and questions regarding legibility and state recognition. Jenny is revising her thesis for publication.
Fran Martin's research over the past fifteen years has focussed on the transformations being wrought on concepts, practices and experiences of gender and sexuality as a result of cultural and media globalisation in the Sinophone world (The People's Republic of China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and the Chinese diaspora). Her best-known research analyses these issues in relation to queer social movements as well as television, film, literature, internet culture and other forms of cultural production. Fran's current research project focusses on the experience of women students from the People's Republic of China undertaking higher education in Australia, especially their negotiations of gendered selfhood and cultural identity. Fran's publications include Mobile Cultures: New Media in Queer Asia (co-edited with Chris Berry and Audrey Yue, Duke UP, 2003); Backward Glances: Contemporary Chinese Cultures and the Female Homoerotic Imaginary (Duke UP, 2010), Situating Sexualities: Queer Representation in Taiwanese Fiction, Film and Public Culture (Hong Kong UP, 2003), Angelwings: Contemporary Queer Fiction from Taiwan (Hawai'i UP, 2003); AsiaPacifiQueer: Rethinking Genders and Sexualities (co-edited with P. Jackson, M. McLelland and A. Yue, Illinois UP, 2008); and Embodied Modernities: Corporeality, Representation and Chinese Cultures (co-edited with L.N. Heinrich, Hawai'i UP, 2006). Fran is a Senior lecturer in Cultural Studies at the University of Melbourne.

Geir Henning Presterudstuen is an early career researcher and lecturer at the School of Social Sciences and Psychology at the University of Western Sydney. He has a long-standing research interest in Fiji and Pacific Island communities, and his Ph.D. in sociocultural anthropology, on 'Masculinity, Manhood and Tradition in Contemporary Fij,' was awarded in 2011. His current research work focusses on processes of gender identification and bodily practices in postcolonial settings and the changing conceptions of the body and social categories like gender, race and ethnicity at the interface of notions of tradition and modernity.
Masaya Shishikura is a post-doctoral fellow at the International Institute for Asian Studies, Leiden, the Netherlands, where he conducts research on trans-border humanity through case studies of travelling music and migrating peoples in Northeast Asian contexts. Prior to this, he conducted research on Ogasawara musical culture at the Australian National University, where he received his PhD in 2014. In 2010, he received the best student paper prize from the Musicological Society of Australia. He also conducted research on Hawaiian hapa haole music and received an MA degree from the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa in 2007. In 2004, he was a visiting student at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and conducted fieldwork on Temple Street, Kowloon.
Amy Holmes-Tagchungdarpa is an assistant professor in the Department of Religious Studies at Grinnell College. She is author of The Social Life of Tibetan Biography: Textuality, Community and Authority in the Lineage of Tokden Shakya Shri (Lexington, 2014). Her research explores forms of Buddhist community, networks of cultural production and interpersonal relationships in the transnational border regions of China, Tibet, Sikkim, Bhutan, Northeast India and Ladakh, as well as other communities in the East and South Asian Himalayas through the methodological perspectives of history, religion, gender, literature, the comparative study of empire, material culture and media. She is currently working on several projects broadly related to local and translocal experiences and definitions of modernity, including a critical history of Tibetan-language public spheres, an exploration of women in global Buddhist modernist movements, and a survey of Bhutia language literature in Sikkim.
Yu Zhang received her Ph.D. in East Asian Languages and Literatures at the University of Oregon in June 2013. She is currently an assistant professor of Chinese at Loyola University Maryland. Her research interests include women's narratives in late imperial and early modern China, opera performance, and missionary documents in East Asia.
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Published with the support of the Gender Relations Centre, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University.
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URL: http://intersections.anu.edu.au/issue35/cont_issue35.htm