Ekalan Hou

Ekalan Hou is a PhD candidate in the History of Art and American Studies programs at Yale University. Her interdisciplinary research interests include 19th- and 20th-century photography, histories of US militarism and imperial policing in Asia, and art of the Asian diaspora. Her dissertation, “Aesthetics of Counterinsurgency,” examines the visual vocabulary of US liberal counterinsurgency operations in Asia in the mid-century. 

 

She is a 2026-2027 Predoctoral Fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and was a 2025-2026 Marron Research Consortium Fellow at The Museum of Modern Art in New York. Her scholarly writing and criticism have appeared in Photography and Culture, Modernism/Modernity, Artforum, e-flux, Benezit Dictionary of Artists, and Asian American Artists: 1850 to Now.