Delineating a Diaspora

COLLEGE OF LIBERAL ARTS

Dr. Sophea Seng is a CSULB alumni and first-generation Cambodian American college student, and now is Assistant Professor in the Department of Asian and Asian American Studies. She specializes in transnational migration and diasporic studies with an emphasis on Cambodian American refugees and their identities, agency, and access to rights. Dr. Seng has expertise in ethnographic methods and community-based research in multiple languages and geographic locations, and her research interests overlap with religious, performance, and critical refugee studies.

Since Dr. Seng began her position in 2021, she has received funding and been invited to present research and facilitate PhD workshops at three universities across the United States and the world. In a 2023 global competition by the Association for Asian Studies, Dr. Seng was selected as one of 12 early-career scholars to participate in the Pushing Boundaries in Asian Studies workshop. She is currently working on a book, Religious and Racial Others: Buddhism and the Cambodian Diaspora in Italy, that speaks to ongoing political movements to address the spiritual and racial traumas that Asian Americans have faced and continue to endure and challenge. Dr. Seng’s work crosses geographical boundaries and intersects multiple fields, and although her book is based on the specific conditions for the formation of the Cambodian Buddhist diaspora in Italy, it will play an important role in informing interdisciplinary research on migration, diasporic politics, and postwar reconciliation in the coming years, especially in the unprecedented upsurge in the production of refugees worldwide.

Dr. Seng’s research on Cambodian refugees is changing the ways we understand the experiences of survivors of war. To date, Dr. Seng has been awarded over $100,000 in grant funds for her research. This includes awards from the American Council for Learned Societies, the Fulbright Program, and the Henry Luce Foundation.