Date: Friday, May 13, 2016 Time: 9AM to 4:30PM
Place: CUNY Graduate Center
365 Fifth Avenue, Concourse Level, Manhattan
Biographies
Moustafa Bayoumi is an award-winning writer, and associate professor of English at Brooklyn College, City University of New York. Born in Zürich, Switzerland, and raised in Kingston, Ontario, Canada, he currently lives in Brooklyn. Bayoumi completed his Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He is co-editor of The Edward Said Reader (Vintage, 2002), editor of Midnight on the Mavi Marmara: The Attack on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla and How It Changed the Course of the Israeli/Palestine Conflict (first published by OR Books, trade edition by Haymarket Books, 2010) and has published academic essays in publications including Transition, Interventions, the Yale Journal of Criticism, Amerasia, Arab Studies Quarterly, and the Journal of Asian American Studies.
Angie Y. Chung is an Associate Professor of Sociology at SUNY Albany. Dr. Chung has served as visiting professor at Yonsei and Korea University and is currently the 2016 CUNY Thomas Tam Visiting Professor at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her areas of expertise include immigration and the second generation, community and urban sociology, gender and family, race and ethnicity, Asian American studies, and qualitative methods.
Dr. Chung is author of Legacies of Struggle: Conflict and Cooperation in Korean American Politics (Stanford University Press, 2007). Her forthcoming book, Saving Face: The Emotional Costs of the Asian Immigrant Family Myth, is currently in press with Rutgers University Press. She is currently working on an NSF-funded research project on the politics of economic growth and urban redevelopment in Koreatown and Monterey Park, Los Angeles.
Emily Dong is an undergraduate student at Cornell University, particularly engaged in on-campus advocacy in the environmental and API communities. As a member of Asian Pacific Americans for Action @ Cornell (APAA), she’s continuing the push for an Asian American Studies major that will encapsulate and center the diverse histories of Asian Americans.
Theodore S. Gonzalves is a scholar of comparative cultural studies who has taught in the United States (California, Hawaiʻi, and Maryland), Spain, and the Philippines. His research interests include Asian American cultural studies, Filipino/American histories and cultures, and the relationship between social movements and cultural expressions. Prof. Gonzalves is associate professor and a former chair of the Department of American Studies at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, where he is also an affiliate faculty member in the Asian Studies program and the Language, Literacy, and Culture doctoral program.
Jennifer Hayashida is Director of the Asian American Studies Program at Hunter College/CUNY. A poet, translator and visual artist, Jennifer is the recipient of awards from, among others, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, the New York Foundation for the Arts, PEN, the Witter Bynner Poetry Foundation, the Jerome Foundation, and the MacDowell Colony. Additionally, she serves on the board of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. Her fields of interest include representations of the welfare state and immigrant experience; cross-genre literature and film; translation; Asian American community activism.
Russell C. Leong is the founding editor of the Asian American / Asian Research Institute’s CUNY FORUM publication, and consulting senior editor for International Projects at UCLA. Leong is a past CUNY Thomas Tam Visiting Professor at Hunter College/CUNY, Spring 2011 & 2012-2013. During his 33-year tenure as an academic editor at UCLA, he edited the first books and journals on Asian Pacific media and film, on Asian American sexualities, on Asian Americans post 9/11, and on Asian American transcultural studies.
From 1977-2010, Leong was the editor of the foremost journal in Asian American Studies, Amerasia Journal, published by the UCLA Asian American Studies Center. There, he served as an adjunct full professor of English and Asian American Studies. His stories Phoenix Eyes (2000) and poetry Country of Dreams and Dust (1993) received an American Book Award and PEN Josephine Miles Award.
Ravi Kalia is Professor of History at City College of New York/CUNY. Dr. Kalia specializes in South Asian studies, particularly urban-architectural history in colonial, post-colonial India. He is the author of Chandigarh: The Making of an Indian City (1987; revised, 1999), Bhubaneshwar: From a Temple Town to a Capital City (1994), and – Gandhinagar: Building National Identity in Postcolonial India (2004, 2005), and Imaging India in the Twentieth Century: An Architectural View (Forthcoming).
His other research/teaching interest is the rise of religious radicalism in South Asia, and he has edited two volumes on radicalism in a cluster of volumes to be published by Rutledge. The published volumes include Pakistan: From the Rhetoric of Democracy to the Rise of Militancy (2011), and Pakistan’s Political Labyrinths: Military, Society and Media (2015). He is the recipient of CCNY Distinguished Service Award, and was designated Distinguished Asian-American Role Model by the Asian-American Alumni Association of CCNY.
Dr. Kalia has received three Fulbright scholarships and numerous other research awards. His courses cover subjects ranging from Architectural History, Urban Studies, Popular Culture, Cinema, Religious Radicalism and Communal Conflicts, and Subaltern Studies.
Prema Kurien is the Founding Director of Asian/American Studies and Professor of Sociology at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School. Dr. Kurien is a past CUNY Thomas Tam Visiting Professor at the CUNY Graduate School, 2014-2015. Her recent research focuses on race and ethnic group relations, as well as the role of religion in shaping group formation and mobilization among contemporary ethnic groups. Bringing the areas of race, religion, and social movements together, she examines how religious institutions and organizations often provide the setting within which new ethnics confront the racialization they experience within the wider society and engage with their homelands.
Dr. Kurien has received postdoctoral fellowships and grants from the National Science Foundation, The Woodrow Wilson International Center, the Carnegie Corporation, the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, the Pew Charitable Trusts, the Center for the Study of Religion at Princeton University, the American Institute of Indian Studies, the Louisville Institute, and the New Ethnic and Immigrant Congregations Project. Her work has been recognized with a Contribution to the Field award, two national book awards, and three national article awards.
Peter Kwong is Distinguished Professor of Urban Affairs and Planning at Hunter College/CUNY, as well as Professor of Sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center. He is a pioneer in Asian American studies, a leading scholar of immigration, and an award-winning journalist and filmmaker, widely recognized for his passionate commitment to human rights and social justice.
As a scholar, Kwong is best known for his work on Chinese Americans and on modern Chinese politics. His books include Chinese America: The Untold Story of America’s Oldest New Community and Chinese Americans: An Immigrant Experience, co-authored with his wife, Chinese historian Dusanka Miscevic. His other books include Forbidden Workers: Chinese Illegal Immigrants and American Labor, The New Chinatown, and Chinatown, New York: Labor and Politics 1930-1950. As an activist, he speaks regularly to the media on immigrant and labor issues.
Eng-Beng Lim is Assistant Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and author of Brown Boys and Rice Queens: Spellbinding Performance in the Asias (NYU, 2014). His fields of study include performance and cultural studies, Asian/American studies, postcolonial/diaspora studies and queer/transnational studies.
Prof. Lim is currently working on two book-length studies, one is on the visual and performative interplay of boy harems as a form of sensate queerness, and the other is on the assembly of transnational performance through the global university complex, botanical performance (such as Singapore’s Gardens by the Bay), and large-scale theatrical adaptations of world authors (Murakami, Shakespeare, Hwang). His third project is a collaborative research initiative on senses with Tavia Nyong’o. At Dartmouth, he is part of the Steering Committees of GRID (Gender Research Institute at Dartmouth) and the Women’s and Gender Studies Program.
Joyce Moy is the Executive Director of the Asian American / Asian Research Institute. She was the first Asian American director of a NYS Small Business Development Center where she helped to secure $25 million in funding for small business. Her area of expertise is entrepreneurship and economic development. She has taught business law and taxation at Queens College, the CUNY School of Law, and at Cornell University School of Law. She is a former practicing attorney. Recently she developed a 45-hour curriculum to train financial counselors embedded in CBO’s, which has been adopted as a national model for replication nationwide by Cities for Financial Empowerment.
Phil Tajitsu Nash has served as the Founding Executive Director of the Asian American Justice Center (AAJC), Staff Attorney at the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund (AALDEF), Curator at the Asian Pacific American Program at the 2010 Smithsonian Folklife Festival, and columnist for the N.Y. Nichibei and Asian Week newspapers. He has taught law, urban studies, and APA history, art, oral history, and public policy classes at UMCP, Yale, NYU, City College of New York, CUNY, and Georgetown law schools. Prof. Nash is a strong believer in experiential education, and incorporates oral histories, community outreach, field trips, and group-based activities into each of his classes.
Kelvin Ng is an undergraduate student at Columbia University majoring in History and Anthropology. His main areas of focus are on colonialism and the historical constructions of race and gender. Kelvin is also a columnist for the Columbia Spectator and a spoken-word poet, writing on issues of colonialism, imperialism, diaspora, queerness and food.
Kevin Park is a senior year undergraduate student at Hunter College/CUNY, studying Asian American Studies. Kevin also works for Hunter’s Asian American Studies Program and is a member of CRAASH (The Coalition for the Revitalization of Asian American Studies at Hunter), organizing on-campus events as well as campaigning for an Asian American Studies major at Hunter. Off-campus, he was a Public Housing Organizing Intern for CAAAV: Organizing Asian Communities, and a Community Organizing Intern for Girls for Gender Equity. He was also a former Steering Committee member of Gay Asian and Pacific Islander Men of NY (GAPIMNY) and a former board member of Restaurant Opportunities Center of NY. Kevin also became involved with Cop Watch through the Harlem Cop Watch Team and also has patrolled with the Jackson Heights Cop Watch team.
Shirley S. Tang is Associate Professor in the Asian American Studies Program in the School for Global Inclusion and Social Development at the University of Massachusetts Boston where she has taught since 2001. Her fields of expertise include war, race and migration; Southeast Asian American community studies; multi-generational Chinese diaspora studies; local/global and comparative gender and ethnic studies; and storytelling through media/cultural production. Currently a Research Fellow with the Penn Center for Minority Serving Institutions, she recently led a U.S. Department of Education-funded collaborative project for a network of Asian American Native American Pacific Islander (AANAPISI) institutions in California and Massachusetts focusing on digital storytelling, student development, and college success. She holds a Ph.D. in American Studies from SUNY Buffalo and a B.A. in English with Honors from Chinese University Hong Kong.
Cindy Wong is Professor of Media Culture at the College of Staten Island/CUNY. Prof. Wong has worked on domestic and global issues within an interdisciplinary framework that draws on communications, media studies, anthropology, cultural studies, and documentary production. Drawing on her background in Hong Kong – where she was born and raised – and her research experience in East Asia, Europe, Latin America and the United States, she incorporates multicultural and global perspective throughout her studies. She also believes that students should be taught to become Global Citizens and has led students through the Pearl River Delta to study globalization, development and diaspora.
In addition to teaching general communications classes, Prof. Wong teaches classes on Global Media, Multicultural Literacies, Media and the Margins, and the Peopling of New York.
Janelle Wong is a Professor of American Studies and the Director of the Asian American Studies Program. Prior to joining the faculty at the University Maryland in 2012, she was at the University of Southern California in the Departments of Political Science and American Studies and Ethnicity. She also served as Executive Director of the Institute of Public Service at Seattle University (2011-12).
Wong’s research is on race, immigration, and political mobilization. She is author of Democracy’s Promise: Immigrants and American Civic Institutions (2006, University of Michigan Press) and co-author of two books on Asian American politics. The most recent is Asian American Political Participation: Emerging Constituents and their Political Identities (2011, Russell Sage Foundation), based on the first nationally representative survey of Asian Americans’ political attitudes and behavior. Her current book project focuses on how growing numbers of Asian American and Latino evangelical Christians will impact the traditional conservative Christian movement and immigrant political participation.
Mitchel Wu is a program manager at The Coalition for Asian American Children and Families (CACF), the nation’s only pan-Asian children’s advocacy organization, Mitchel manages education policy work as well as CACF’s city wide afterschool youth program ASAP (Asian American Student Advocacy Project) and parent POWER (Parents Organized for Equal Rights). Mitch works with NYC public school parents and high school youth to build leadership skills, develop youth and parent led campaigns, and increase engagement in the school and city-wide levels.
Mitchel received his Bachelor of Arts in Social Science Interdisciplinary and U.S. History from SUNY Stony Brook and his Master of Arts in Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State University. He is an alumni of the CORO NY Immigrant Civic Leadership Program (ICLP) and the Leadership for Emerging Asian Pacifics Emerging Leaders Program (LEAP ELP). In addition, for the past 8 years Mitchel has been a lecturer at CUNY Hunter College in the Asian American Studies department. Mitch also serves in New York City’s Citywide Council on English Language Learners (CCELL).
Luwei Xiong is a senior in Francis Lewis High School. She joined The Coalition for Asian American Children and Families (CACF’s) youth leadership program Asian American Student Advocacy Project (ASAP) in 2013 when she immigrated to this country 3 years ago and settled in Flushing, Queens. As a recent immigrant, she realized many issues among Asian families and students and wanted to get involved to make some changes and improve herself and her community. In ASAP, Luwei worked with her fellow youth participants to launch several campaigns. A notable issue was to reform comprehensive guidance in NYC public schools. Last year, ASAP worked with NYC City Council to pass a bill to collect data on guidance in public schools. This year, ASAP aims to get Ethnic Studies in K-12 public education. Luwei is currently considering her college options. To date, she has been formally accepted to Yale, Princeton, CUNY Macaulay Honors, Wellesley, Barnard and Cornell University. She is interested in studying law and public policy.
