Asian American Studies Program Events

Thursday 4/8, 12:30 p.m., IMU Georgian Room Arc 2010! Panel for Part 3: "Cooperatively Building for the Future: Rethinking Paradigms"
John Bodnar (History, Institute for Advanced Study); Lillian Casillas (La Casa Latino Cultural Center); Hilary Kahn (Center for the Study of Globasl Change; Global Studies Minor)

Thursday 4/15, 3 p.m., IMU Georgian Room ARC 2010! Speaker for Part 3 Jack Tchen (NYU), "The Urgency of Knowing: building a Cross-Cultural Learning Commons"
Brief bio and description of talk provided below.

The Urgency of Knowing: Building a Cross-Cultural Learning Commons Jack (John Kuo Wei) Tchen

As the U.S. further “globalizes” and we respond to ever-diverse student populations, this nation’s research universities are clearly at a moment in need for more cross-cultural ways of knowing. This is a good time to ask some fundamental questions about our framings and practices. Reflecting on 30 years of work as a public and academic historian, “a curator of brainstorming,” and as a “re-organizer,” Jack Tchen will offer a vision of a cross-cultural learning commons and some thoughts on how we can collaboratively build such spaces at our research universities. The ideas are simple, but doing so does require some foundational reworking of how we do what we do. And this is the hard part. But it can be done and is already happening at our institutions, especially informally in the lives of our undergraduate and graduate students, and younger faculty. But do we recognize it? Do we value it?

Brief biographic profile:
Professor Tchen is the founding director of the A/P/A (Asian/Pacific /American) Studies Program and Institute at New York University and a co-founder of the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis, NYU. He co-founded the Museum of Chinese in America in 1979-80 where he continues to serve as senior historian. Jack was awarded the Charles S. Frankel Prize from the National Endowment for the Humanities (renamed The National Medal of Humanities). He is author of the award-winning books New York before Chinatown: Orientalism and the Shaping of American Culture, 1776-1882 and Genthe’s Photographs of San Francisco’s Old Chinatown, 1895-1905. And he is co-principle investigator of “Asian Americas and Pacific Islanders Facts, Not Fiction: Setting the Record Straight” produced with The College Board.

Professor Tchen has been building research collections of Asians in the Americas. In doing so, he has critically examined practices of collections and archives to make sense of how we come to know what we know, and don’t know.

Professor Tchen is now working on a book about New York City – focusing on the unrecognized tradition of the intermingling of people, creativity and improvisation of everyday residents. He is also editing The ‘Yellow Peril’ Reader: Understanding Xenophobia. He regularly collaborates with filmmakers and media producers, artists and collectors, and through the A/P/A Institute sponsors and produces hundreds of programs and performances. Most recently, he co-curated MoCA’s core exhibition: “With a single step: stories in the making of America” in a new space designed by Maya Lin.