Established in 2017 to commemorate the UCI Libraries Southeast Asian Archive’s 30th anniversary, the Southeast Asian Archive Anne Frank Visiting Researcher Award is given annually to an individual researcher who lives outside of Orange County and is not currently affiliated with UC Irvine. Named in honor of Anne Frank, the archive’s founding librarian who retired in 2007, the $1,000 award is intended to defray the cost of traveling to Irvine, California to conduct hands-on research within the archive.

The endowment fund was established to provide ongoing support for generations of future scholars to visit the SEAA, part of the UCI Libraries Special Collections and Archives. Faculty, students, and independent researchers (including filmmakers, scriptwriters, playwrights, biographers, novelists, and others) are encouraged to apply.

Award Recipients

This year, the Libraries were able to award and support three visiting scholars: 

• Em Butler, a social documentation master’s in fine arts (MFA) student in the Film and Digital Media Department at University of California, Santa Cruz

• 

  Giang Nguyen-Dien, a postdoctoral fellow in American Culture Studies at Washington University in St. Louis
• Franklin Meyer, a PhD student in history at the University of California, Davis

All three fellows visited UC Irvine this summer to meet with Anne Frank and complete a day of research. Their projects include a film, book publication, and doctoral dissertation.

Em Butler’s ongoing research project Cat’s Tale (working title) will take the initial form of a 20-minute docu-fiction film. Incorporating experimental performance and interviews of her family, the film will follow her mother’s trip back to Cambodia for the first time since leaving in 1981. 

“Considering how Cambodia’s cultural genocide destroyed many records of pre-1975 visual culture and artifacts,” explained Butler, “my work engages what was preserved through formal archives and what otherwise lives on through familial oral history.”

Her itinerant research seeks to answer these questions: How do the cultures of immigrant Khmer communities change or stay the same, depending on where they have settled in the world? How do we resist the continuous displacement of culture due to assimilation, revisionist histories, and an impulse to forget what can be painful to remember?

Giang Nguyen-Dien, who received her PhD in American studies at the University of Kansas (KU), is working on a book manuscript that focuses on the haunting of US militarism in Asia-Pacific and the affective afterlives of the Cold War that structure the politics of refugee lives.

Franklin Meyer’s research at the SEAA focused on resettlement programs for Hmong refugees between 1975 and 1990. This research will inform his dissertation – tentatively titled “Public Health and Secret Wars: Aid, Welfare, and the Politics of Hmong Resettlement” – which will evaluate Hmong sovereignty in Laos and the United States between 1954 and 1990. His project focuses on public health systems and refugee resettlement programs to examine how Hmong people maintained their autonomy across different geographies and political systems.

To learn more about the Anne Frank Visiting Research Award, see the application guidelines and list of previous award recipients.

About the Southeast Asian Archive

Founded in 1987 at UCI Libraries, the Southeast Asian Archive (SEAA) was created to support the documentation and preservation of the history of Southeast Asian diasporic communities, which encompasses the Cambodian, Hmong, Khmer, Laotian, and Vietnamese diaspora. Since 2015, the archive has existed as part of the Libraries’ Orange County and Southeast Asian Archive (OC&SEAA) Center, which supports research on underrepresented groups in Orange County and Southeast Asian American experiences.

For information on SEAA’s collections, see UCI Libraries’ finding aids, which can help guide information search, and related digital collections.

Top Image: Em Butler in the UCI Libraries Special Collections and Archives Verle & Elizabeth Annis Reading Room reviewing archival materials with Anne Frank and Christina Woo, interim curator of the Southeast Asian Archive