Class of 2025
(She/Her/Hers)
Hometown: Chapel Hill, North Carolina
Majors: Statistical Science; International Comparative Studies
Mellon Project: Strangers into Kin: Death’s Aftermath and its Production of Race
I will explore the way that the production of mourning practices mediates the boundaries of racial categories. I’m interested in the expansion (and narrowing) of categories of Asian mournability—those who are rendered grievable as Asian subjects—in the latter half of the twentieth century, and the implications that these expansions had for contemporary Asian/American self-mythologizing. What are we actually grieving when we grieve these deaths, and what are the stakes of the public mourning that facilitates tenuous community? Why are particular deaths marked as mournable symbols for the grief of what gets approximated as Asian-ness or racialization, and others fade into the noise of inevitability? By drawing on frameworks of racial capitalism, necropolitics, and precariousness, I hope to historicize the role that the hegemonic production of death’s aftermath has played in consolidating a liberal Asian subject who is able to be mourned by people who did not know her in life.
Brief Bio: My name is Nichole, and I'm studying international comparative studies and statistics, which I promise are more related than they seem! I spent the summer of 2023 studying Asian/American racial formations in the context of settler innocence, and it grew into my current project on the role that collective mourning plays in creating racial identity. I recently studied abroad in Hong Kong and have discovered a new passion for mango mochi.