Lok Siu is a cultural anthropologist and Professor of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley. Her areas of expertise include Asian diasporas in the Americas, Chinese diaspora, un/belonging and citizenship, racial/ethnic/gender formation, food, and ethnography. Her books, Memories of a Future Home: Diasporic Citizenship of Chinese in Panama and Asian Diasporas: New Formations, New Conceptions (co-edited with Rhacel Parreñas), received the Social Science Book Award from the Association for Asian American Studies in 2007 and 2009. Other books include Gendered Citizenships: Transnational Perspectives on Knowledge Production, Political Activism, and Culture and Chinese Diaspora: Its Development in Global Perspective. Her new book, Worlding Asian Latinx: Cultural Intimacies in Food, Art, and Politics is forthcoming. She is currently working on a new project tentatively titled, Chifas: How Chinese Food Became Peru’s National Treasure.
Recently, she led a team of undergraduate students to conduct archival and ethnographic research to produce the website, “The Radical History of San Francisco Chinatown.” As Chair of the Asian American Research Center, she helped launch several campus-community collaborative projects, including the Pipeline for AANHPI Community Health, the CAA Oral Histories Project, and the project on Community Archival Resilience and Engagement: Voices of Asian American Elders in the Post-COVID San Francisco bay Area. In 2022, She also convened the 30th Anniversary Conference of the International Society for the Study of Chinese Overseas, a multi-sited conference involving UCB, UCLA, and Jinan University that took place in San Francisco, CA; Guangdong, China; and via Virtual Webinars.
She has lectured at universities throughout the US and Europe; at museums such as the Smithsonian, the Museum of Food and Drinks in NYC, the Chinese American Museum in LA, and the California African American Museum; and at institutions such as the World Bank and the IMF. She has appeared in a range of news media, including CBS News, New York Times, NBC News, Bloomberg, CNN, and WNYC.