Jessica is a PhD candidate in the Department of Ethnic Studies, with a designated emphasis in women, gender, and sexuality studies. Her research takes up the late-nineteenth-century Pacific Northwest borderlands as a site where Indigenous dispossession and Chinese exclusion emerged as intertwined processes through the building up of the Canada-US border. Examining encounters between Chinese migrants and Indigenous nations in the aftermath of the US Chinese Exclusion Act, her dissertation considers how seemingly minor instances of contact or border crossing had transnational policy implications, while the closing of the border in turn had intimate consequences for Indigenous and Chinese borderlands residents. Her Hildebrand Fellowship will support her as she conducts archival research in Victoria, Vancouver, and the British Columbia interior.
Jessica holds a BA in ethnic studies from Brown University. Her work has been published in Kalfou: A Journal of Comparative and Relational Ethnic Studies
