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Contacts

Contacts

Joshua Chun Wah Kam is the SEAP Graduate Student Conference Chair. 

Joshua Chun Wah Kam

A headshot of Joshua Chun Wah Kam

I’m Josh, a third-year PhD student in the Department of Asian Studies, helming the graduate conference committee for spring 2024. I study culinary history in my native Malaysia. Food was a big pivot for me; in another life, I studied histories of desire in classical Javanese and Malay literature during a Fulbright Fellowship in Indonesia (2019) and my subsequent MA at the University of Michigan (2021). My current projects center on other kinds of desire, tracing the aftertastes and leftover longings of twentieth-century restaurants. It’s hard to imagine a better intellectual home for my projects than SEAP, among my cosmopolitan colleagues and our many, many cuisines. Some of our best ideas come together over the diasporic dinner table–itself a de facto tradition of the program. I’m excited to helm this year’s conference, and to meet the confluence of scholars arriving in snowy Ithaca. Dress warmly. We’ll see ya here in the spring!