Faculty Associate Dean Yung-Yi Diana Pan
Yung-Yi Diana Pan
Yung-Yi Diana Pan is foremost a teacher and mentor. As a 1.5-generation immigrant and first-generation college student, she was inspired by her own educator role models to pursue higher education. She challenges her students to underscore their own positionality and experiences in their own education journey.
Inspired by her childhood growing up in the Pacific Northwest, Pan’s research broadly examines the experiences of nonwhite individuals in predominantly white spaces. Her primary spaces of inquiry are elite professions. Pan’s previous work focused on processes of racialization in law school; she is the author of Incidental Racialization: Performative Assimilation in Law School (Temple Univ. Press, 2017). Building on that project, Diana’s current work interrogates the role(s) and significance of diversity, writ large, in three elite professions: law, medicine, and higher education. Her work has appeared in sociology and interdisciplinary journals.
Pan extends her interdisciplinary lens and sociological imagination beyond Brooklyn College by serving in leadership roles of professional organizations, and by being a part of community social and racial justice efforts. A proud product of public schools, Diana earned a Ph.D. in Sociology from University of California, Irvine, M.A. in Ethnic Studies from San Francisco State University, and B.A.s in Political Science and Ethnic Studies from Oregon State University.
