About Us

Faculty from Liberal Arts and Sciences, Communications and the Law School and staff from the Office of Multicultural Student Affairs and students from DePaul's Asian Cultural Exchange (ACE) worked with the support of the Dean's Office of LA&S to create the Asian American Studies minor program. The minor was officially launched in the winter quarter of 2005 and our first two minors graduated in the spring of 2008.

The Field of Asian American Studies

Established in the midst of the Civil Rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s, the field of Asian American Studies provides a critical perspective on the formation of U.S. society by studying groups with roots in Asia and the Pacific.  Asian American Studies thus contributes to developing a fuller and more accurate account of American culture by documenting and examining the particular ways in which Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders have articulated their identities and struggled to secure their rights throughout U.S. history.

Because there is no single Asian American identity, our program defines Asian America broadly to include people who have lived here for generations, as well as recent immigrants.  Asian American groups include people with Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, Indian, Korean, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Pacific Islander, and Southeast Asian ancestry, among others.  Drawing together fields as diverse as American and ethnic studies, art and cultural studies, Asian studies, international business, history, literature, and political science, our courses employ multidisciplinary perspectives to bring into focus the global economic, socio-cultural, and political factors that shape Asian America.

For more information on the field of Asian American Studies, visit http://www.aaastudies.org/