Announcing Our Sigur Center Graduate Student Associates

About the Program:

Graduate student associates (GSAs) are students at the George Washington University pursuing a master’s or doctorate in an Asia-related topic in any discipline who have been for an affiliation with the Sigur Center through a highly competitive application process. Successful applicants receive up to $1000 in reimbursement for research and conference travel expenses that are made within the 2025-26 academic year (i.e., by August 15, 2026). GSAs also have access to a shared desk in the Sigur Center for the duration of their affiliation.

The 2025-2026 Graduate Student Associates

Nayoung Bishoff is a PhD candidate in English at The George Washington University, where she is a Columbian Distinguished Fellow. Her research focuses on comparative literature between East and West, particularly Shakespearean adaptations and Romanticism. Bishoff’s work engages with gender studies, cultural globalization, and film and theater studies. Her publications have appeared in Literature/Film Quarterly, The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Global Shakespeare, and Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation, among others. In addition to her scholarly work, her short story “The Land of Canaan,” which portrays the plight of North Korean refugees, received the Korean Literary Society of Washington’s award in 2023. Her writing on this topic was also featured by Radio Free Asia and the Korea Times. Bishoff currently serves as Editor-in-Chief of Korean Literature of Washington. This year, she was selected as a recipient of the Korean Honor Scholarship, awarded by the Embassy of the Republic of Korea in the United States.

InJung Cho is a Ph.D. candidate in Education at the Graduate School of Education and Human Development, The George Washington University. She is a co-chair of the New Scholars Committee (NSC) and the Youth Development and Education Special Interest Group (YDESIG) at the Comparative and International Education Society (CIES). Prior to her studies at GW, she developed digital literacy and arts education programs for North Korean refugee students at People for Successful COrean REunification in South Korea. She also served as a global citizenship educator with the Korea International Development Cooperation Center’s World Friends Korea Volunteer program, interned at UNESCO Bangkok, and worked as an outreach coordinator for the FreshEd podcast. InJung holds a master’s degree from the Graduate School of Asia-Pacific Studies at Waseda University in Japan. Her research focuses on children’s identity development, non-formal education, and the spatial-relational dynamics in everyday learning experiences within urban slum contexts in Indonesia and the Philippines.

Soumi Ganguly is a PhD candidate and Graduate Teaching Assistant in the English department at GW. Her research interests revolve around South Asian Studies, Global Migrations, and Critical Refugee and Border Studies. She is working on a dissertation that investigates the violence of postcolonial state-making and forced displacement from Sri Lanka and Myanmar.

Liya Lin is a Ph.D. student in Anthropology at the George Washington University. She graduated from Carnegie Mellon University and Florida State University, where she studied Music Education and Musicology. Her dissertation investigates the real-time processes of clinical diagnosis of autism in urban China.

The Sigur Center for Asian Studies is a university research institute at the Elliott School of International Affairs at the George Washington University. Its mission is to increase the quality and broaden the scope of scholarly research and publication on Asia, promote US-Asia scholarly interaction, and serve as the nexus for educating a new generation of students, scholars, analysts, and policymakers. The Sigur Center is also the academic home of the Asian Studies Program, which is the largest in the Washington, DC metropolitan area with 60+ faculty members working on Asia.

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