Center Staff
Heidi Kim
Center Director
A Letter from the Director, September 2020
Heidi Kim is a professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature. Her research ranges through nineteenth and twentieth-century American literature and Asian American studies. Illegal Immigrants/Model Minorities: The Cold War of Chinese American Literature (Temple University Press, 2021), sheds new light on the writing of and about Chinese Americans, who were dogged by the stigma of illegal immigration and paranoia about Communist infiltration. Her first monograph Invisible Subjects: Asian Americans in Postwar Literature (Oxford UP, 2016) resituates the work of Ralph Ellison, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, and the Melville Revival critics through recent advances in Asian American studies and historiography.
She also researches and speaks extensively on the literature and history of the Japanese American incarceration, including Taken from the Paradise Isle (UP Colorado, 2015), which won a Ka Palapala Po’okela Award from the Hawaiian Book Publishers Association. She enjoys partnering with community and academic organizations on this topic, including Out of the Desert at Yale University and Densho: The Japanese American Legacy Project.
Prof. Kim received her undergraduate degree in Biochemical Sciences from Harvard University and her Ph.D. in English from Northwestern University, with a brief management consulting stint in between. (“It’s a long story,” she says.) She has been a Tar Heel since 2010 and lives in Chapel Hill with her husband, young daughter, and a large black cat.
Prof. Kim has completed the UNC HAVEN, SafeZone, and SafeZone Continuing Education: Trans and Nonbinary trainings, as well as the Racial Equity Institute’s Phase I program.
Email Prof. Heidi Kim about the AAC
Krupal Amin
Associate Director
Krupal Amin joined the AAC from The North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics, where she taught American Studies, CRT, and WGSS and served as American Studies Coordinator. She received her undergraduate degree in English and Comparative Literature at UNC-Chapel Hill, a master’s degree in English literature from UNC-Charlotte, and a Ph.D. in English literature at The Ohio State University. Her research focuses on 20th and 21st century U.S. multiethnic literatures, specifically the bildungsroman in Asian American and African American literatures, and race and ethnic studies. She’s also interested in the intersection of whiteness, humor, and class in racial formation.
Dr. Amin has completed the UNC SafeZone and UndocuCarolina trainings.
Marcus Donie
Program Coordinator
Marcus is a two-time UNC alumnus with a Bachelor’s in Psychology and a Master’s in Information Science. He transitioned over from the Carolina Athletics Department and is also a Resilience Coach for the Carolina Collaborative for Resilience.
He has completed the Carolina Firsts, Coach Approach, DEI in the Work Place, Embody Carolina, Green Zone, Mental Health 1st Aid, One Love, Safe Haven, Safe Zone & UndocuCarolina trainings.
Email: donid@unc.edu