In Memoriam: Jane Singh

Jane Singh, who taught courses on South Asian history, literature, and social issues in the Asian American and Asian Diaspora Studies program of Ethnic Studies between 1991 and 2016, passed away in Yuba City on August 18, 2024.

She received her PhD at Berkeley in the South Asian Languages and Literature
Department. Her dissertation was titled “Echoes of Revolution: The Role of Literature in the Gadar Movement.”

Between 1986 and 1990, Dr. Singh served as an outreach coordinator for the Center for South Asia Studies, conducting lecture series and workshops on South Asian studies at various high schools, colleges, and public institutions. As director of the National Endowment for the Humanities People of South Asia in America project, she worked with the UC Berkeley Center for South and Southeast Asian Studies and the Oakland Public Library, conducting research, curating and writing materials for the exhibition, and coordinating the national tour.

During the course of her career, she served as speaker, panelist, and advisor to many museums, including the Asian Art Museum, the Oakland Museum, and the Sutter County Memorial Museum and gave presentations on Sikh communities in the US at a number of universities, including not only UC Berkeley but also UC Santa Barbara, UC Santa Cruz, and UC San Diego.

In the early 1990s, a group of South Asian women in Dr. Singh’s class responded to the dearth of women’s writings by creating Our Feet Walk the Sky (Aunt Lute 1993), an anthology of writing by women of South Asian descent. Dr. Singh wrote the forward.

As an early member of Asian Women United of California (AWU) who participated in the organization through the decades, Dr. Singh served on the editorial boards of three AWU publications: Making Waves: Writing: An Anthology of Writings By and About Asian American Women (1989), Making More Waves: More Asian American Women’s Writing (1997), and InvAsian: Asian Sisters Represent (2003). She was also on the advisory boards of two of AWU’s video documentaries Labor Women (2003) and Slaying the Dragon: Reloaded (2011).

Between 2008 and 2015, Dr. Singh was Academic Integration Coordinator for the UC Berkeley Study Abroad program. She also served on the Scholars Advisory Board of the Angel Island Foundation project and edited the chapter on South Asians in Angel Island: Immigrant Gateway to America (ed. Judy Yung, 2010). She was a member of the International Association for the Study of Forced Migration and the Association of Asian Studies Research Group on the Punjab. Just before retiring from her position at UC Berkeley, she became co-coordinator of the Valley Voices oral history project, which involved interviews of South Asians who migrated to the Yuba City area in the early years of the 20th century and their descendants.