Board of Directors Nominees
Nominees for a 3-year term on the Board of Directors, 2026-2029
The following nominees will present themselves for election to the Board of Directors at the Business Meeting to be held in conjunction with the ASIANetwork Annual Conference in Naperville, Illinois in March 27-29, 2026.
Elizabeth Lawrence
Augustana College
Elizabeth Lawrence is an Associate Professor of History at Augustana College and Chair of the Asian Studies program. She teaches courses on the history of premodern and modern East Asia, twentieth-century China, the Japanese Empire and the modern Olympic Games. She is currently completing a monograph that blends family memoir with transpacific history while starting a new project on the transpacific circulation of flowers.
Zach Smith
University of Central Arkansas
Zach Smith, a cultural historian of modern China and the Chinese diaspora in America, is an Associate Professor of History, Associate Director of the Center for Asian Languages and Cultures and the Coordinator of the Interdisciplinary Asian Studies Minor Program at the University of Central Arkansas. He is also Director of the Arkansas Partner Site for the National Consortium for Teaching about Asia. His research focuses on questions of citizenship and belonging among rural Chinese communities on both sides of the Pacific. In 2023 he partnered with the Chinese Association of Arkansas to found the Arkansas Chinese Heritage Project, a multidisciplinary online oral history archive showcasing the rich history of Chinese communities in the Arkansas and Mississippi Deltas.
Lisa Yoshikawa
Hobart & William Smith Colleges
Lisa Yoshikawa is a Professor of History and Asian Studies at Hobart & William Smith Colleges. She teaches courses on premodern and modern Asia-Pacific, with focus on oceanic and terrestrial empires, colonialisms, cross-cultural and cross-species encounters and conflicts, nation-building, the environment, and world history. Her research focuses on the Japanese empire’s history of conservation science, including zoogeography, limnology, and coral/reef sciences.