James Sun

James Sun is a Ph.D. student in Ethnic Studies at University of California, Berkeley focusing on Asian American environmental history. They are currently researching the history of Asian rice in the U.S., including how rice came to the U.S., the communities and inter-ethnic relations that formed around growing, cooking, and eating rice, and the environmental impact of growing rice in the U.S. James formerly taught on a Fulbright Fellowship in South Korea, worked at an environmental nonprofit focused on industrial decarbonization, and graduated from Yale with a degree in Statistics and a degree in Global Affairs. They are excited to combine their environmental work and statistical analysis skills with their interest in Asian American history.

Updated February 2025

Stories from This Author

Japanese Americans and the Federal Writers Project: Part II—The New York Project

Feb. 27, 2025 • James Sun , Greg Robinson

Read Part I Beyond making the WPA guidebooks, FWP workers in various places were hired to do special assignments, notably interviewing ordinary Americans and collecting folklore. The most famous and valuable aspect of the oral history project was the large-scale series of interviews that FWP researchers conducted with elderly African Americans about their experiences under slavery in the antebellum South. Some oral history projects included Asian Americans. The Northern California unit produced anonymous oral histories of Asian immigrants (including the …

Franklin D. Roosevelt generations Great Depression, 1929-1939 life interviews New York (N.Y.) Nisei oral histories presidents United States

Japanese Americans and the Federal Writers Project: Part I—The Western WPA Guides

Feb. 26, 2025 • James Sun , Greg Robinson

The Works Progress Administration (WPA) was a short-lived but historically significant federal agency. Founded in 1935 as part of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and directed by Harry L. Hopkins, its goal was to create and finance public-sector jobs to give work to millions of unemployed Americans during the Great Depression. While most of these jobs were unskilled, there were divisions created for skilled workers, including artists and intellectuals—“they are workers, too,” FDR is said to have remarked. To give …