University of California, Berkeley

Graduate Student, Ethnic Studies

Letters and Sciences

About

One year after her Cham-French Vietnamese mother and American father evacuated during the Fall of Saigon, Julie Thi Underhill was born in the United States.

Since 1999, she's studied the Cham and their Austronesian, Hindu, and Muslim kingdom of Champa, which thrived for 1,500 years in present-day Viet Nam. Her work addresses Cham origins, religious forms, mortuary rituals, matrilinealism, and the history of conquest, colonialism, war, and emigration from Viet Nam and Cambodia. She's interested in the intersections of Cham historical memory, ethnic identity, spirituality, and acculturation. She also focuses upon gender, remembrance, and mourning in Island/Southeast Asia, postwar exodus, postcolonialism, critical auto/ethnographic theory, and documentary filmmaking and photography.

Julie's experience includes 16 years of humanistic photography, two postwar study tours, oral histories of survivors and veterans of wars in Viet Nam, Cambodia, and El Salvador, and inclusion in Maxine Hong Kingston's 'Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace' and in Gina Masequesmay's and Sean Metzger's 'Embodying Asian/American Sexualities.'

Julie continues to edit the documentary she filmed in 2006 of her Hindu Cham grandmother's second burial ceremony. In collaboration with Asiroh Cham at UCLA, Julie has recently begun a documentary on the Khmer Rouge war crimes tribunal's genocide charge against five senior KR officials, who attempted to decimate the ethnic Cham in Cambodia during Pol Pot's regime. She filmed in Cambodia in June and July 2010.

Julie is a Chancellor's Fellow at UC Berkeley, where she is pursuing her doctorate in Comparative Ethnic Studies with an emphasis on Asian American history, Asian American cultural production, and women of color feminism. Her dissertation concerns the historical memories and cultural practices of the Cham of Viet Nam, Cambodia, the United States, and elsewhere in the diaspora.

Previous Education:

2007-09, Master of Arts in Ethnic Studies, University of California-Berkeley, Berkeley, CA

2005-06, fellow at UMass-Boston's William Joiner Center for the Study of War and Social Consequences, Boston, MA

2002-05, film/video production courses at Portland Art Museum's Northwest Film Center, Portland, OR

1997, photography courses at Instituto Allende, San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato, Mexico

1994-2000, BA in art, social/cultural history, and documentary production/theory from The Evergreen State College, Olympia, WA

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