Jane LeSkaife

The 2012-2013 recipient of the Southeast Asian Archive Anne Frank Visiting Researcher Award is Jane LeSkaife, a doctoral student in Sociology at UC Davis. Ms. Le Skaife is the fourth recipient of the $500 award, named after the founding librarian of the Archive. The award is made possible by an anonymous donor to defray travel costs to do research in the Libraries highly regarded Southeast Asian Archive.

The subject of Ms. LeSkaife's research is "Transnational Tightrope: A Study of Vietnamese Refugees in France and the United States." The Southeast Asian Archive (SEAA) documents the experiences of the refugees and immigrants from Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos (the former Indochina) in their new home countries, and are the strongest collections in the U.S. for Jane's research.

Thanks to the award, Jane had funding to travel to UCI and spend time in the archive last summer. Her research in the archive complements the extensive interviews she conducted with Vietnamese refugees in Orange County, which she began in 2010. She also completed over 60 in-depth interviews in France during March/April 2011, where the Vietnamese-French community was established four generations ago.

Ms. LeSkaife expects to receive her degree in June 2013. With the help of the Southeast Asian Archive, her work will contribute new insights to the growing body of scholarship on refugees and their transnational ties.