CEAPS Graduate Student Travel Grant

CEAPS Graduate Student Conference Research Travel Grant Spring 2025 Awardees

Ting-Syuan Lin

Ting-Syuanu is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Sociology. She will be presenting at the Population Association of America 2025 Annual Meeting.  Her paper is titled, "Educational Assortative Mating & Remarriage in Taiwanese Transnational Marriages".

Yangyang Liu

Ting-Syuanu is a Ph.D. student in the School of Information Sciences. She will be presenting at International Research Society for Children's Literature 2025 Congress.  Her paper is titled, "Alice Travels to China: And Also Crossing the Boundary Between Sleep and Awake."

Darren Sheng-Hsuan Chuang

Darren is a PhD student in Musicology. He will be presenting at 2025 Inter-Asia Conference: "Geo-Social Connection: The Continuing Journey of Critical Inquiry. His paper is titled as "A Sonic Vortex of inter-Asian Ties: Close Listening to Taike Tunes in Taiwan's Post-Martial Law Music Scene."

Alina Stetsuk

Alina Stetsuk, a PhD student in East Asian Languages in the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences, will present her paper titled "Bridging the Gap: Effective Career Advising for Asian International Students in U.S. Higher Education" at the 67th Annual World Social Science Association Conference.

Cheeno Marlo Sayuno

Cheeno Marlo Sayuno is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the School of Information Sciences. He will be presenting his paper, "The House that Filipinos Built: Cultures of Belonging in Philippine Picture Books in the US" at the  27th Biennial International Research Society for Children's Literature (IRSCL) Congress on Borders, Migration & Liminality in Children's Literature.

Haiyi Li

Haiyi Li is a PhD candidate in history. He will be presenting his paper, "Trans China: A Queer History of Gender in Modern China" at the sixth Biennial Conference of the International Society for Chinese Law & History.

Peihan Wan

Peihan Wan is a master student in East Asian Languages in the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences. She will be presnting her paper, " Capillaries of Popular Culture: Fluid Media Networks in Everyday Life-Popular Music, RPGs, and Anime in Inter-Asian and Global Contexts" and " Embodied Memories: Fostering Cross-Cultural Empathy through Historical RPGs in the Digital Age" at 2025 Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Conference.

Michelle Lê 

Michelle Lê is a phd student in the School of Information Sciences. she will be presenting her co-authoring  paper, "Keeping Afloat: Water, War, and Vietnamese Diaspora in Picture Books" at the 2025 IBBY Asia Pacific Regional Conference.

CEAPS Graduate Student Conference Research Travel Grant Fall 2024 Awardees

Shuyan (Michael) Huang
Shuyan is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Political Science. He will be presenting at the International Studies Association Midwest Annual Conference in St. Louis, Missouri.  His paper is titled, "Can You Buy Good Stories about Yourself?: Foreign Aid Donor, Recipient Elite Debates, and Domestic Politics".

You Lan
You is a Ph.D. student in the Department of History. She will be presenting at the 2025 OAH Conference on American History in Chicago, IL.  Her paper is titled, "The Chinese Diaspora in the Reinvention of Heteronomoativity in California and Guangdong, 18902 - 1930s".

Qinglin Luan
Qinglin is a Ph.D. student in the Department of East Asian Languages & Cultures. She will be presenting at the Association for Asian Studies in Columbus, Ohio.  Her paper is titled, "From the Little Pink to the Tankie: The Transformation of Political Identities Among Chinese Netizens and its Implications for Social Movement Organization in the Digital Age".

Jiwon Oh
Jiwon is a Ph.D. student in the Institute of Communications Research. She will be presenting at the Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences in Waikola, Hawaii.  Her paper is titled, "Navigating Gendered Anthropomorphism in AI Ethics: The Case of Lee Luda in South Korea.

Woohui Park
Woohui is a Ph.D. student in the Department of East Asian Languages & Cultures. She will be presenting at the Association for Asian Studies Annual Conference in Columbus, Ohio. Her paper is titled, "Whose Injustice, Which Punishment?: Reconceptualizing Morality in the Debate Over the New Criminal Code of Great Qing, 1906 - 1911".

Xiaoyen Ren
Xiaoyen is a Ph.D. student in the Department of East Asian Languages & Cultures. She will be presenting at the AHA 138th Annual Meeting in New York City. Her paper is titled, "Obstructed Embrace: The ID Card Institution in Shanghai, 1945 - 49".

Isela Silvera
Isela is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Linguistics. She will be presenting at the 31st Japanese/Korean Linguistics Conference in Melbourne, Australia. Her paper is titled, "Comprehension and Production Mis(alignment): Experimental Evidence from Korean Reflexives".

Luming Xu
Luming is a Ph.D. student in the Department of East Asian Languages & Cultures. He will be presenting at the AHA 138th Annual Meeting in New York City.  His paper is titled, "competing Colonialities: Nation-state Building and Nation-Empire Construction of Chinese & Japanese Migration Projects in Manchuria, 1914 - 1945".

Paul Un (Dissertation Research)
Paul is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Political Science.  He will be traveling to Phnom Penh, Cambodia and Siem Reap, Cambodia to work on his dissertation research.  His project is titled, "The Political Economy of Aid Competition from the Recipient Perspective: Evidence from Cambodia".

CEAPS Graduate Student Conference Research Travel Grant Spring 2024 Awardees

Do Young Gong
Do young is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Political Science.  She will be presenting at the International Studies Association in San Francisco, California.  Her paper is titled, "Violence Begets Peace? Failed Coup Attempts and Civil War Peace Processes".

Yating Li
Yating is a Ph.D. student in the Department of East Asian Language & Cultures.  She will be presenting at the 2024 annual meeting of the American Association for the History of Medicine in Kansas City.  Her paper is titled, "Power Dynamic in the Knowledge Production of HPV Vaccination in Mainland China (the 2000s to the Present)"

Yangyang Liu
Yangyang is a Ph.D. student in the School of Information Science.  She will be presenting at the Children's Literature Association 2024 Annual Conference in Madison, Wisconsin.  Her paper is titled, "Sleep or Awakening? The Alice in Wonderland Dream Frame Reimagined in Alice's Travels in China".

Forrest McSweeney
Forrest is a Ph.D. student in the Department of East Asian Languages & Cultures.  He will be presenting at the Association of Asian Studies in Seattle, Washington.  His paper is titled, "Fighting Formulas: Markets, Drug Mobilization, and Military Medical Practice in 18th Century China".

Yulin Pan
Yulin is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Linguistics.  She will be presenting at the 45th Language Testing Research Colloquium in Innsbruck, Austria. Her paper is titled, "Coocurrence of Disfluency Features of L2 Speech across Proficiency Levels in Controlled and Spontaneous Tasks".

CEAPS Graduate Student Dissertation Research Travel Grant Spring 2024 Awardees

CEAPS Graduate Student Conference Research Travel Grant Fall 2023 Awardees

Hanna Kim
Hanna Kim is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Education Policy, Organization, and Leadership (EPOL) with a concentration in Global Studies in Education at UIUC. Her research interests align with a sense of belonging and identity among Asian international students in US higher education, as well as Asian American history education, where she is currently involved in the Teaching Equitable Asian American Community History (TEAACH) project. Prior to pursuing her Ph.D. program, she worked for World Vision Korea (NGO) as a broadcast filing coordinator and studied for her master's in Applied Linguistics and TESOL at the University of Mississippi.
Something Hanna is passionate about is she hopes to contribute to creating a welcoming climate in academic communities where all students feel they belong to the department and university.

Hanna's is presenting a paper titled, "Transnational Experiences of Korean International Doctoral Students in the U.S. with Foreign Policy Implication," at The Association for the Study of Higher Education in Minneapolis, MN.

Haiyi Li
Haiyi took his undergraduate degree from Centre college in central Kentucky. During his  Kentucky time, he became interested in the analytic philosophy, notably thinkers like Kant, Hegel, Frege, and Marx. He was trained to think like a philosopher. His dream is to become a thinker one day, just reading some boring philosophy pieces while sitting in my cozy chair drinking coffee hahaha...
Haiyi is passionate about theories, theories, and theories!!!
Haiyi came to his paper topic because, "gender comes to me as a unique subject capturing my intellectual curiosity from the beginning of my career. My research is greatly indebted to the gender theorists such as Foucault, Butler, Sedgwick, and Traub. I am truly fascinated by how well their arguments challenge our notion about our identity, body, and sex. So I decide to focus on the issues of how gender affected the everyday experience for people living in the eighteenth century rural China. Gradually, I become interested in reading about the lived experience of widows, their struggles with their male relatives, and sometimes the stories about their sexuality. Through my research I find a world in which widows were portrayed as masculine figures, despite the fact that their widowhood was oftentimes celebrated by the male elites as the fulfillment of their femininity. I am amazed by how much the experience of these pre-modern widows challenged the binary of gender, revealing the complexity of gender performances in a pre-modern society."

Haiyi is presenting a paper titled, "Gender, State, and Power: A Power of Windows in Eighteenth - Century Rural China," at the Association for Asian Studies Annual Conference in Seattle, WA.

Lingyan Liu
Lingyan is presenting a paper titled, "Sounds of Antiquity, Awakenings, and Apprehension: Listening to Night Watchmen in China 1910s - 1940s," at the Association for Asian Studies Annual Conference in Seattle, WA.

Woohui Park
Woohui is a PhD student in the Department of EALC. She has extensively explored intellectual history and philosophy in late Qing and early Modern China with a specific focus on the transformation of Confucian thoughts among Chinese intellectuals in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Woohui holds a Master's degree in the Department of Philosophy at Korea University and earned her Bachelor's degree at the University of Seoul.
Woohui is passionate about aiming to examine the transition and intellectual debate over ritual and law after the promulgation of the New Criminal Code of Great Qing (Daqing xin xinglü) in the early 1900s while tracing the interdisciplinary approaches of philosophy, intellectual history, and institutional history
Woohui came to her paper topic by delving into how modern Confucian scholars in the late Qing grappled with the complex concept of ritual (li) to reconceptualize it as a traditional institution. This prompted her to focus on the topic for the upcoming AAS presentation, zooming in on Zhang Taiyan's (###) intellectual journey as he fragmented the unified and universal understandings of ritual and ritualism.

Woohui is presenting a paper titled, "Navigating the Dissonance of Ritual and Ritualism in Twentieth Century China: A Study of Zhang Taiyan's Re-Conceptualization of Ritual," at the Association for Asian Studies Annual Conference in Seattle, WA.

Yujie Pu
Yujie is currently studying East Asian history. She studied in the department of history at the Chinese University of Hong Kong before U of I.
Yujie is dedicated to learning about and enhancing health and wellness through both her research and everyday life.
Her presentation delves into the issue of criminal responsibility of suspects with mental illness in late imperial China. This topic is a crucial component of her dissertation project, which examines the regulation of madness in Chinese history.

Yujie is presenting a paper titled, "The Boundary between Insanity and Criminal Responsibility in Qing China," at the Association for Asian Studies Annual Conference in Seattle, WA.

David Kwon Kwan Tsoi

David holds a MPhil and a BA in anthropology from the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He is now a doctoral student in cultural anthropology. He is interested in the state-society relations, governmentality, and diaspora under authoritarian governance, particularly in the context of the post-2019 Hong Kong. His previous work is about queer politics and sex work in Asia. He has published in Sexualities
David came to his paper topic when after taking a graduate seminar "Decolonizing Knowledge" with Dr. Faye Harrison, he decided to write a paper about colonial and decolonial politics in Hong Kong in the aftermath of 2019 social movement. Hong Kong's distinctive geopolitical and historical positioning as a postcolonial city in China has offer a gap in the literature of decolonial studies. As such, David presented a paper on the way Hong Kongers strategically deploy coloniality to navigate what he calls multiple hegemonies in the 2023 American Anthropological Association meeting.

David is presenting a paper titled, "Strategic Coloniality: Political Subjectivity and Multiple Hegemonies in Hong Kong," at the 2023 American American Anthropological Association/Canadian Anthropology Society in Toronto, Canada.

CEAPS Graduate Student Conference Research Travel Grant Spring 2023 Awardees

Myung Jung Kim

Myung Jung Kim is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Political Science at UIUC. Her research addresses topics at the intersection of conflict, international law, and transitional justice.  Her research broadly is guided by the question of what decides the intricate balance of peace and justice and how it is achieved. Prior to the doctoral program, she worked as a researcher at the Korea Institute of National Unification. She also holds an M.A. from Johns Hopkins SAIS and a B.A. from Purdue University.

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Katherine Kwak

Katherine (Seung Ah) Kwak is a Linguistics PhD student and a Korean teaching assistant at UIUC. She specializes in psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, and heritage language acquisition. Specifically, Katherine is interested in how Korean heritage speakers process Korean sentences using psycholinguistic methods. With the CEAPS travel award, she will be presenting a linguistics research study at the 26th Annual Conference of the National Council of Less Commonly Taught Languages. This pilot study explores Korean learners' feelings toward the use of Korean folktales in the classroom. Upon completion of the PhD in Linguistics, Katherine hopes to pursue an academic career.

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Lingyan Liu

Lingyan Liu is a PhD candidate in the History Department. Born and raised in China, she got her BA in Opera, Film, and Literature and MA in Chinese Modern Literature. She is currently working on a dissertation provisionally titled That Hideous Sound: Singing, Shouting and Shrilling of Chinese and Chinese Americans, 1850s-1930s, which explores sonic stigmas attached to Chinese people and Chinese soundscapes. She investigates how the sounds of Chinese labors, street hawkers, opera performers, and festival firecrackers were historically constructed as unnatural, unpleasant, jarring, and monstrous. Her research is funded by the Humanities Research Institute this academic year.

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Lucie Lu

I am a Ph.D. Candidate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I study international relations with a regional focus on China. My research delves into China’s global influences in three international regimes: media, human rights and foreign aid. I observe China is adept at using innovative propaganda strategies to improve the public’s perceptions of home government performances. I also discover that China’s subtle approach to shaping human rights norms, leading to greater receptiveness to their perspectives in the Global South than we expected. Finally, my research shows that China is skillful at using overseas development to extend its influence over recipient countries.

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Kyoko Sawada

Kyoko is a 2nd year MA Student in the department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Their major area of interest is Japanese pedagogy, with general research interests in Japanese linguistics and Japanese aesthetics. They work as a graduate assistant with the Center of East Asian and Pacific Studies. Their interests include Japanese pedagogy and aesthetics.

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CEAPS Graduate Student Dissertation Research Travel Grant Spring 2023 Awardees          

Arya Budi

Arya Budi is a Ph.D. student in Political Science. The mass public's growing behavioral and attitudinal excesses in favoring a political leader motivate him to investigate the origins of presidential identification. By conducting a cross-national study and closely examining the case of Indonesia, Arya is familiar with electoral studies through multiple approaches. Before coming to Illinois, he was a research manager, a Jakarta-based pollster, and a researcher at Universitas Gadjah Mada, Indonesia. He was also a fellow at Electoral Integrity Project and Global South Academic Network. He has published his works in several academic outlets and op-eds.