Rosanne Sia is an interdisciplinary scholar whose research and teaching engage cultural histories of race and performance, gender and sexuality, migration and borders, and oral history and memory. At UBC, she is faculty associate with Asian Canadian and Migration Studies and the Sound and Humanities Research Cluster.

Rosanne received her Ph.D. in American Studies & Ethnicity from the University of Southern California along with a certificate in Gender & Sexuality Studies. She also received a Master of Arts in History at the University of British Columbia.

My first book project, Mujer Peregrina: Performing Race, Space, and Memory in the Texas-Mexico Borderlands, explores how Mexican American women and girls mobilized performance to intervene in the cultural, social and political scene of South Texas in the 1930s to 1960s. I draw on oral history and archival research to show how they carved out spaces for song and dance to develop an alternative borderlands imaginary that sustained intergenerational networks of care centered on Mexican American women and girls.

My second book project, Fantasy in Motion: Performing the Asian Femme Across American Borders, explores how Asian American performers embodied the figure of the Asian femme on hemispheric nightclub circuits in the early Cold War. It explores how Cold War racial fantasies about Asia opened up potential for new queer encounters and relationalities as performers traveled across the United States, Canada, Cuba, and Mexico.

I am also developing my interests on transpacific ties to Latin America through a community engaged oral history project on Chinese Peruvian migration to Canada.

Sia, Rosanne. “The ‘Touch’ of Bolero Song in the Texas-Mexico Borderlands.” In Women’s Innovations in Theatre, Dance, and Performance. Vol. 1, Performers, edited by Colleen Kim Daniher and Marlis Schweitzer. London: Bloomsbury (forthcoming).

Sia, Rosanne. “Transpacific Exoticisms: Performing Asia Across the U.S. Southern Border.” American Studies Journal with American Studies International 61, no. 3 (2022): 151-173.

“The Vedette ‘China’ on Havana’s International Cabaret Stage.” In When East is North and South: East Asia, Latin America, and the Decolonization of Transpacific Studies, edited by Jordi Serrano Muñoz and Chiara Olivieri, 2022.

“Crime and its Punishments in Chinatown.” In Vancouver Confidential, edited by John Belshaw, 133-139. Vancouver: Anvil Press, 2014.