Michelle Ha

Michelle Ha is a fourth-year PhD candidate in Modern Thought and Literature researching how Koreans were trafficked to Mexican agave fiber plantations at the turn of the twentieth century. She began studying histories of plant fiber materials to disentangle conflicting assertions of the Korea-Mexico migration’s racial and colonial dimensions within existing scholarship; this has led to her current project on classifications of plants, fibers, and human mobility as histories of technology. Ha is excited to explore plants/fibers cross-disciplinarily and learn in community with the students, staff, faculty, and practitioners in the “Fiber Optics” research collective at Stanford.