About Donna Anderson

Donna Doan Anderson (she/her) is a sixth-year PhD candidate in the department of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her dissertation, titled “America is in the Heartland: Land Policy, Immigration, and Rural Asian America, 1860-1950,” examines how the U.S. heartland operates as an Asian American space, unified in experiences of exclusion. As a result, her interests lay primarily in Asian American histories and Midwestern studies, though can be extended to the interventions founds in scholarship on settler colonialism, agrarian studies, and critical refugee studies. Her research on Asian American agricultural and rural communities brings her to several Midwestern and Intermountain states and she is grateful to be affiliated with the Huntington Library, Charles Redd Center for Western Studies (BYU), Digital Ethnic Studies Research Institute (University of Nebraska), and the Immigration History Research Center Archives (University of Minnesota). Her published works can be found in the Journal of Peasant Studies, Journal of Asian American Studies, Ethnic Studies Review (forthcoming), American Studies Journal (forthcoming), and Middle West Review (forthcoming), while a co-authored chapter examining remittances and urban development in Vietnam can be found in Governing Cities in the 21 st Century: Asian Perspectives (Routledge, 2020). In addition to research, she serves as the Assistant Editor for the Journal of Asian American Studies and as the graduate student representative for the Association of Asian American Studies’ History section. At UCSB, she is actively involved in the Asian/American Studies Collective.