Mark Tseng-Putterman, Ph.D., is a historian of Asian American community politics, Cold War imperialism, and social movements.
My scholarship has been supported by the Mellon Foundation/American Council of Learned Societies, the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at New York University, and the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center. I earned his PhD in American Studies at Brown University in 2024.
In 2024-2025, I will be the Panda Express Postdoctoral Fellow in Asian American Studies at University of Pennsylvania.
My manuscript-in-progress, Cold War Diaspora: Asian American Internationalism and the Geopolitics of Belonging, draws on community archives, state records, and oral history interviews to explore how Asian Americans' overlapping concerns for ethnic and international politics shaped community politics during the 1950s-1980s.
A comparative case study of Chinese, Filipino, and Japanese American engagements with US policy in their countries of ancestry, the project uses Asian American internationalism as a lens for analyzing the colliding agendas of geopolitical, urban, and ethnic politics that shaped Asian American political claims in the postwar period.
My research has been published or is forthcoming in journals such as Amerasia Journal, the Journal of Asian American Studies, and Pacific Historical Review. With Diane Wong, he is also co-editing a book manuscript on contemporary Asian American activism titled Asian America Rising: New Directions in Asian American Activism, forthcoming with New York University Press in Spring 2025. You can view my academic CV in full here.
Members of the Van Troi Brigade, a Japanese American anti-war group, burn the Japanese imperial flag during a protest at Los Angeles’ 1972 Nisei Week. Image via Visual Communications.
I am also passionate about public-facing scholarship and community engagement.
In addition to sharing my work through a number of community-based workshops and programs, my general audience writing on Asian America, racial politics, and US foreign policy has appeared in publications including The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Atlantic, Boston Review, and ROAR Magazine.