The Houston Asian American Archive Junior Scholar Award
The Houston Asian American Archive (HAAA) awards Junior Scholars with a focus on the Asian diaspora and the immigration experience, inspired by the materials in its collection. The HAAA collection is available both online and physically in the Woodson Research Center of the Fondren Library. Rice University’s Chao Center for Asian Studies awards up to two Junior Scholars cash prizes of $2000 each annually to support research. Return to this page for the application, which is set to reopen in the early Fall Semester.
2026 Junior Scholar Award Recipient
Mohamad Kadan is a PhD student in the History Department at Rice University. He holds a Master’s degree in Sociology from University College Dublin, where he specialized in Race, Migration, and Decolonial Studies, and completed a multidisciplinary undergraduate degree at Tel Aviv University. His research examines Palestinian history through oral history, archives, and political economy, with particular attention to exile, military rule, and global processes of decolonization and development. While working as an intern at the Houston Asian American Archive, Kadan engaged closely with Houston-based oral histories, which reshaped his approach to archives, community, and place, and now form a central component of his research on Palestinian exile, memory, and intellectual life. He is the co-founder of the Edward Said Forum, a platform for Palestinian students in the Social Sciences and Humanities, and has published widely in Arabic and English on political, historical, and sociological themes. His recent peer-reviewed article, “The Impossible Factory: Dependency and Elimination in Israel’s Settler-Colonial Economy (1956–1960),” was published in Middle East Critique in 2025.
Mohamad's HAAA Junior Scholar Award project Palestinians in Exile: Culture, Global Histories, and the Making of a Nation, centers on Houston-based Palestinian oral histories to explore how exile, memory, and intellectual life have shaped modern Palestinian history. Drawing on my work at the Houston Asian American Archive, particularly its oral history collections, the project examines how Palestinians in Houston narrate displacement, political commitment, and cultural production across generations. These life histories are read alongside archival materials to trace connections linking Palestinians in Israel under military rule (1948–1966) to broader transnational circuits of decolonization, development, and Cold War political economy. By foregrounding oral testimony, the project shows how Palestinian histories in exile—stretching from Haifa and Ramleh to Beirut and Houston—preserve political knowledge, sustain intellectual networks, and challenge state-centered narratives of modernization promoted through Israeli and Afro-Asian development frameworks.
2025 Junior Scholar Award Recipient
Karen Siu is a PhD candidate in English at Rice University. In her dissertation project, she puts forward how Vietnamese Anglophone cultural works offer an ecofeminist, transcorporeal vision of hope, care, and resilience in the wake of war, imperialism, and colonialism. Her research purposefully intertwines the personal and political by using elements of creative nonfiction and oral history storytelling alongside academic writing. Her interdisciplinary course, Vietnamese American Feminisms in Literature, Art, and Film, delves into the work of Vietnamese American women, queer, and nonbinary creators across the US, in the South, and in Houston to try to understand how they convey complex depictions of race, refugeeness, and immigrant identities alongside feminism and queerness.
For the HAAA Junior Scholar Award, Karen is using the materials from the HAAA’s collection on Vietnamese Americans to develop a unit of her course on Vietnamese American oral histories and storytelling in Houston. The outcome of the research will be a unit for the class, including the lectures she needs to create and teach to the students, and teaching materials on Vietnamese American oral histories and the study of women, gender, and sexuality to be published as curriculum and teaching materials on the HAAA’s website. The curriculum will be publicly accessible to those interested in teaching Vietnamese American oral histories in Houston.