Aniruddha Babar holds a PhD in Law and Governance, an LLM in International Law and Human Rights, and MA degrees in Political Science and Sociology. With experience as a Trial Advocate and Constitutional Expert, he currently serves as a Senior Academician at Tetso College, Nagaland, India, in the Department of Political Science. His research focuses on the Eastern Borderlands, particularly the Indo-Myanmar Border, with special interest in Myanmar, Russia, Afghanistan, and Southeast Asia in general. Aniruddha regularly contributes as a columnist for publications such as Nagaland Post, Nagaland Tribune, Eastern Mirror, Morung Express, The Hills Times, Sikkim Express and Mokokchung Times. He also regularly contributes his scholarly expertise to the Indian Defence Review. He has been invited as a resource person in government training programs, academic workshops, seminars, think tank conferences, and lectures. Additionally, he is the Founder and Director of the public initiative “Project Constitutional Justice” in Tuensang, Nagaland.
Jason Gibbs holds a PhD in Music Theory and Composition from the University of Pittsburgh. He is the Music Librarian at the San Francisco Public Library and the author of the book, Rock Hà Nội & Rumba Cửu Long (2008, updated 2019). He wrote the entry for Vietnam in the Continuum Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World and has published articles in Asian Music, Journal of Vietnamese Studies, Southeast Asian Research and BBC Tiếng Việt. He is also one of the co-authors of Longing for the Past, the 78 RPM Era in Southeast Asia (2013). He writes about Vietnamese music and popular culture on his Tây Bụi blog (taybui.blogspot.com).
Tuan Hoang is Blanche E. Seaver Professor of Humanities and Teacher Education, and associate professor of Great Books at Pepperdine University in California. He grew up in Vietnam and the United States, and received his PhD in History from the University of Notre Dame. His research has focused on twentieth-century Vietnamese history and the history of Vietnamese refugees in the United States. Among his publications are “‘Our Lady’s Immaculate Heart Will Prevail’: Vietnamese Marianism and Anticommunism, 1940–1975,” Journal of Vietnamese Studies 17.2–3 (2022); “Ultramontanism, Nationalism, and the Fall of Saigon: Historicizing the Vietnamese American Catholic Experience,” American Catholic Studies 130.1 (2019), and others. His book chapters include “The Vietnamese Diaspora,” in The Cambridge History of the Vietnam War, vol. 3 (Cambridge University Press, 2024); “Pray the Rosary and Do Apostolic Work: The Catholic Associational Culture in South Vietnam and the Diaspora,” in Republican Vietnam, 1963-1975: War, Society, Diaspora (University of Hawai’i Press, 2023); “Social Mobility and the Meaning of Freedom among Vietnamese Refugees and Immigrants,” in The Vietnamese Diaspora in a Transnational Context: Contested Spaces, Contested Narratives (Brill, 2022); and others. His commentary on the South Vietnamese flag at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 appeared in the second issue of Rising Asia Journal (2021).
Pfokrelo Kapesa is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science, University of Allahabad, India. She has a PhD in Diplomacy and Disarmament from Jawaharlal Nehru University. Her research focuses on Conflict Studies, India-China relations, and Indigenous studies. She was a Swedish Institute Fellow established by the Swedish Government (2015-16), and recipient of the Cariplo Foundation Scholarship by Network for the Advancement of Social and Political Sciences, Italy (2018). She has presented at the Belfast Colloquium on “Political Organisations of Crossborder Minorities” held at the Queen’s University Belfast, and Ventana Conference on “Decolonial Dialogues from Within and Beyond the Global Margins” held at the University of York. She was invited as plenary speaker to the Sustainable Research and Innovation Congress/Sustainability Science Days 2024. She is a Regional Co-Lead for Asia and Oceania on Global Indigenous Youth Summit on Climate Change (GIYSCC). She has published widely in academic journals, edited books, and in the media. She has most recently reviewed Understanding the India-China Border: The Enduring Threat of War in High Himalaya by Manoj Joshi in International Affairs, Volume 99, Issue 1 (January 2023).
Asad Latif is an Indian-origin journalist in Singapore. He is the Co-General Editor of the 50-volume Singapore Chronicles series, and the author of several books, including Between Rising Powers: China, Singapore and India (2007), Three Sides in Search of a Triangle: Singapore-America-India Relations (2008), India in the Making of Singapore (2008), and Lim Kim San: A Builder of Singapore (2009). He graduated with Honours in English from Presidency College in Kolkata, was a Chevening Scholar in History at Cambridge, and was a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at Harvard. He served on the editorial committee of the Cambridge Review of International Affairs and was a member of the president’s committee of the Cambridge Union Society, the university debating club. He was also a Jefferson Fellow at the East-West Center in Honolulu, Hawai’i. His columns and reviews have been published in the Rising Asia Journal. He may be contacted at badiarghat@gmail.com
Jackson Mattocks completed his Bachelor of Arts (Honors) in English and History at the University of Manitoba. Following this, he taught conversational English at public schools in small towns across the Czech Republic. He is currently doing his MA in English at Dalhousie University, where he is now writing his thesis on the themes of childhood memory, shame, and empathy in the novels of Kazuo Ishiguro. He also serves as Book Review Editor for The Dalhousie Review, where he has published an interview with author Andrew Davidson. Jackson intends to continue his studies in English at the PhD level at the University of Calgary in the Fall of 2024.
Minh X. Nguyen is Lecturer of Vietnamese language in the Department of Comparative Literature, University of California, Riverside. He completed his PhD at the same institution in 2018 with the dissertation entitled “Vietnamese Sorrow: A Study of Literary Discourse in Popular Music Life.” Among his publications is the chapter “Commodifying Transnationalism for the General Audience” in Routledge Handbook of Asian Transnationalism (2023).
Vinh Phu Pham is an artist, literary scholar, and critic based in New York City. His writing covers Vietnamese contemporary art, the musical legacies of the Republic of Vietnam, and Asian American literature in diaspora. He has a background in 19th-century Spanish Peninsular literature, the literature of the Spanish Philippines, and Vietnamese Francophone literature. Currently, he serves as an assistant professor of World Literature at the Bard High School Early College Queens campus, a member of the Bard Early College. Among his publications is “Rhizomatic Transnationalism: Nhạc Vàng and the Legacy of Republicanism in Overseas Vietnamese Communities,” in Republican Vietnam, 1963–1975: War, Society, Diaspora, eds. Trinh M. Luu and Tuong Vu (Honolulu, Hawai’i: University of Hawai’i Press, 2023).
Salikyu Sangtam is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at Tetso College in Dimapur, India. He teaches political theory and research methods. His research focuses on Chinese thought, and non-western political thought. He is a regular contributor for the Rising Asia Journal. In 2023, he was invited to an international conference held in Beijing, China organized by the School of Philosophy, Renmin University of China on the theme “Chinese-Style Modernization: Philosophical Perspectives in a Global Context.” And in the early parts of 2024, he was also invited to an international conference organized by the Wuyi Research Institute of Chinese Civilization, Wuyi University, Nanping, China on the theme “Wuyi Forum on the Two Integrations of Five Millennia of Chinese Civilization and Socialism with Chinese Characteristics.” In addition, he has served on numerous invited occasions as a resource person in academic workshops as well as delivering lectures.
