Cathy J. Schlund-Vials has been a member of the ASA for more than two decades and was most recently the President of the Association for Asian American Studies (AAAS). Cathy was a Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of English and Asian/Asian American Studies at the University of Connecticut. At UConn, Cathy was also the director of the Asian and Asian American Studies Institute (AAASI) for ten years and served as the Associate Dean for Humanities and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in the university’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. She now teaches in the Center for Asian American Studies (CAAS) at the University of Texas at Austin.

Cathy is a Cambodian American scholar whose work is rooted in a personal history marked by statelessness, migration, and diaspora; accordingly, her academic work repeatedly examine moments of dislocation, rupture, and movement. In addition to numerous articles and book chapters, she has edited (or co-edited) 11 collections, including Keywords for Asian American Studies (NYU Press), Asian America: A Primary Source Reader (Yale University Press), Disability, Human Rights, and the Limits of Humanitarianism (Ashgate), The Subjects of Human Rights (Temple University Press), and Flashpoints for Asian American Studies (Fordham University Press). Her first book, Modeling Citizenship: Jewish and Asian American Writing, engaged a comparative analysis of two “model minority groups.” Her second monograph – War, Genocide, and Justice: Cambodian American Memory Work (University of Minnesota Press 2012) – accentuated refugee subjectivity, international law, and human rights, specifically with regard to the so-termed “Killing Fields era” (1975-1979). Cathy is currently completing two monographs:  Militarized Excess: Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, and Prosthetic Ecologies: Disability, Environment, and Human Rights.