Guest Speakers

Glocal Experiences in Brooklyn and Beyond

Rosamond S. King

Director, Ethyle R. Wolfe Institute for the Humanities and Professor, Department of English | Brooklyn College

Writer, performer, and artist Rosamond S. King’s book Island Bodies: Transgressive Sexualities in the Caribbean Imagination was named “Best Book” by the Caribbean Studies Association. Her poetry collections include All the Rage and the Lambda Award-winning Rock | Salt | Stone. King's essays have appeared in LitHub, the Ms. blog, Sargasso, The Progressive, The Caribbean Review of Gender Studies, and elsewhere. She has performed around the world and in cyberspace. King is creative editor of sx salon and professor and Director of the Ethyle R. Wolfe Institute for the Humanities at Brooklyn College, part of the City University of New York.

rosamondSking.black

George Stonefish

Activist

George Stonefish is a lifelong resident of New York City, and well-known as a native singer, dancer, artist and speaker. He is a First Nation member (American Indian) who is 1/2 Lenape; 1/4 Ottawa; 1/8 Ojibwa; 1/16 Pottawatomi; 1/16 Miami from Ontario, Canada. However, he was raised in NYC and has spent most of his life working for the First Nation (American Indian) community on both a national and local level. He started his activism at an early age when he went to the takeover of Alcatraz by First Nation students in 1969 with his grandmother and uncle. Since that time he has participated in the defense of Native Nations as a member of their warrior societies and by promoting their struggles through media, as he had the first weekly radio program on Native issues on WBAI 99.5 FM in NYC from 1978 to 1983. He was also raised in the tradition of his people, which has helped him to organize Native Nations’ governmental structures in preparation for federal recognition. He has spoken at the United Nations and at universities across the U.S. Stonefish has worked for the American Indian Community House throughout his life in various capacities, and now sits on the Board of Directors.

Zohra Saed

Poet and Editor

Published poet and editor Dr. Zohra Saed brings expertise in Asian American studies, as well as teaching experience in early college programs at Bard College. She was a Bard Early College OSUN Fellow at the American University of Central Asia in Kyrgyzstan and Al Quds University in Jerusalem. She has been a Fellow at the Institute for Research on the African diaspora in the Americas and the Caribbean as well as the Schomburg Center for Black Culture. Dr. Saed is a first-generation New Yorker who grew up in Brooklyn.

Vivian Truong

Assistant Professor, History, Swarthmore College

Vivian Truong is assistant professor of History at Swarthmore College. She is a community-engaged scholar whose research and teaching interests include Asian American, urban, and social movement history. Her current research project examines Asian American and multiracial movements against police violence in late 20th-Century New York City. She earned her Ph.D. in American Culture at the University of Michigan.

Reverend Doctor Samuel F. Wong

Senior Pastor, Chinese Promise Church

Reverend Doctor Samuel F. Wong is a community’s well-being, physically and spiritually. He has a doctorate degree from New York Theological Seminary, a master’s degree from Hong Kong Baptist Theological Seminary. He is presently the trustee of NYU Langone Family Health Center and has been on the board since 1994. As a spiritual leader, Rev. Wong has been the founder and senior pastor of the Chinese Promise Baptist Church in Sunset Park since 1983. Throughout the years, he hosted events such as the 8th Avenue Summer Street Fairs, Senior Citizen Luncheons, Health Fairs, etc. He has held many leadership positions with faith-based organizations.

Asian American Studies 101

Moustafa Bayoumi

Professor, Department of English | Brooklyn College

Moustafa Bayoumi is the author of the critically acclaimed How Does It Feel To Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America (Penguin), which won an American Book Award and the Arab American Book Award for Non-Fiction, and of This Muslim American Life: Dispatches from the War on Terror (NYU Press), which was chosen as a Best Book of 2015 by The Progressive magazine and also awarded the Arab American Book Award for Non-Fiction. A regular contributor to The Guardian, Bayoumi has also written for The New York Times, New York, The Nation, CNN.com, The London Review of Books, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and many other places. He is also the editor of Midnight on the Mavi Marmara (O/R Books) and the co-editor (with Andrew Rubin) of The Selected Works of Edward Said, 1966-2006 (Vintage). Bayoumi is a professor of English at Brooklyn College, City University of New York (CUNY).

Yung-Yi Diana Pan

Associate Professor, Department of Sociology | Brooklyn College and The Graduate Center, CUNY

Yung-Yi Diana Pan is an associate professor of sociology at City University of New York, Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center. Her research intersect race and ethnicity, immigrant adaptation, education, culture, and professions. Her publications have appeared in peer-reviewed journals and mainstream media. Her first book, Incidental Racialization: Performative Assimilation in Law School (Temple University Press, 2017) examines the socialization of Asian American and Latinx law students as racialized immigrants entering an elite profession. Her current book project explores how elite professionals—doctors, lawyers, and professors—negotiate race and racism.

Disruptive Pedagogies

Anna Gotlib

Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy | Brooklyn College

Anna Gotlib is an associate professor of philosophy at Brooklyn College CUNY, specializing in feminist bioethics/medical ethics, moral psychology, and philosophy of law. She received her Ph.D. in philosophy from Michigan State University, and a J.D. from Cornell Law School. Anna co-edits the International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics. Her work appeared in The Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal, Journal of Bioethical Inquiry, Journal of Medical Humanities, Hypatia, Aeon/Psyche, and other publications. She also edited two volumes on moral psychology for Rowman and Littlefield International—The Moral Psychology of Sadness (2017) and The Moral Psychology of Regret (2019). Currently, she is working on a book on philosophy and COVID-19, and in spring/summer of 2022, she will be a Fulbright Specialist Scholar at the University of Iceland.

Stephanie Jensen-Moulton

Associate Professor, Conservatory of Music | Brooklyn College

Stephanie Jensen-Moulton is an associate professor of musicology at Brooklyn College, where she is also director of the Hitchcock Institute for Studies in American Music. Her edition of Miriam Gideon's 1958 Opera Fortunato was published with A-R's Recent Researches in American Music Series, and she is co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Music and Disability. She has published articles on American music topics including "Blind Tom" Wiggins, Pauline Oliveros, and women in hip-hop, and is also co-convener of the colloquy on "Music and Disability Aesthetics" in the Journal of the American Musicological Society. Her current monograph project centers on American opera and disability, and she is editor of a forthcoming collection on American popular songs as domestic violence narrative.

Susan Longtin

Associate Professor, Department of Communication Arts Sciences and Disorders | Brooklyn College

Susan Longtin is an associate professor in the Department of Communication Arts Sciences and Disorders. She is a licensed, certified speech-language pathologist who has taught graduate and undergraduate courses in the department for the past twenty years. Her research interests include autism, disability, child language, and using yoga to enhance traditional speech-language therapy in adult Parkinson’s patients and children. During the pandemic she delved deeply into online pedagogies,completed multiple trainings in this area, and earned the Association of College and University Educators’ certificate in Effective College Instruction.

María R. Scharrón-del Río

Associate Dean and Professor, School of Education | Brooklyn College

María R. Scharrón-del Río, Ph.D. is Associate Dean of the School of Education, professor and former Program Coordinator of the School Counseling graduate program at Brooklyn College (CUNY). They were the recipient of the Claire Tow Distinguished Teacher Award in 2017 – the highest teaching award at Brooklyn College. They have published numerous works, including co-edited books (Counseling Across Cultures, 7th edition, 2016, Sage; Queer Psychology, forthcoming, Springer), chapters, and peer-reviewed articles, and has done over a hundred local, national, and international presentations. Their research, scholarship, and advocacy focus on ethnic and cultural minority psychology and education, including liberation pedagogy, intersectionality, multicultural competencies, LGBTQ issues, gender variance, and well-being.

The Subaltern Archive

Colleen Bradley-Sanders

Professor, Library | Brooklyn College

Professor Colleen Bradley-Sanders is head of Brooklyn College's Archives and Special Collections. Her focus is on providing access to unprocessed collections and digitizing those with significant importance and researcher interest. She has won three grants, including one to digitize valuable footage from the award-winning documentary A Life Apart: Hasidism in America; and one to digitize the sermons of the Rev. Dr. William Augustus Jones, Jr. A recent publication, "Sunday Sounds: Preserving the Radio Ministry of Brooklyn's Bethany Baptist Church" (Journal of Archival Organization, 2020) focused on the significance of the Jones collection and the effort to preserve it.

Louis Fishman

Associate Professor, Department of History | Brooklyn College

Louis Fishman is an associate professor in the History department at Brooklyn College, City University of New York. He is the author of the book, Jews and Palestinians in the late Ottoman Era, 1908-1914: Claiming the Homeland (Edinburgh University Press, January 2020). His academic work focuses on late Ottoman Palestine, the Jews of the Ottoman Empire, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He also is a regular contributor for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, where he writes mostly about Turkish and Israeli politics. He divides his time between New York, Istanbul and Tel Aviv.

Vivian Louie

Professor, Urban Policy and Planning and Director, Asian American Studies Program and Center | Hunter College

Vivian Louie is Professor of Urban Policy and Planning and Director of the Asian American Studies Program and Center at Hunter College (CUNY). Dr. Louie wrote two books, Compelled to Excel: Immigration, Education and Opportunity Among Chinese Americans and Keeping the Immigrant Bargain: The Costs and Rewards of Success in America and co edited a third book, Writing Immigration: Scholars and Journalists in Dialogue. Dr. Louie has been associate and assistant professor, and postdoctoral fellow in education, and lecturer in sociology at Harvard, a program officer at the William T. Grant Foundation, as well as a newspaper journalist, journalism teacher, and youth magazine editor.

Lauren Mancia

Associate Professor, Department of History and Director, Studies of Religion Program | Brooklyn College

Lauren Mancia is an associate professor in the Department of History, the Director of the Studies of Religion program at Brooklyn College, and in 2021-22, the Wolfe Institute Faculty Associate. She has many publications on the history of emotions and Christian devotional practices in the European Middle Ages, particularly in eleventh- and twelfth-century monasteries. She is the organizer of the LAMEM working group at BC, dedicated to the study of the premodern world, and she is also a contractual lecturer at The Met Cloisters, the branch of The Metropolitan Museum of Art dedicated to the study of medieval art.

Raquel Alicia Otheguy

Assistant Professor, Department of History | Bronx Community College, CUNY

Raquel Alicia Otheguy (O-TEH-ghee) is an assistant professor of History at Bronx Community College of the City University of New York, specializing in the history of Latin America, the Caribbean, and the African diaspora. Otheguy is a National Academy of Education/Spencer 2020 Post-Doctoral Fellow. Her research is based on material gathered in archives in the Cuban cities of Cienfuegos, Santiago, and Havana, as well as in archives in Tuskegee, New York City, and Washington, D.C. She received her Ph.D. in history from Stony Brook University (SUNY) in 2016 and her B.A. in history from Columbia University. Otheguy is a U.S.-born Latina and a native speaker of Spanish and English.

Gunja SenGupta

Professor, Department of History | Brooklyn College

A professor of history, Gunja SenGupta is the author, most recently, of the forthcoming book, Sojourners, Sultans, and Slaves: U.S. and the Indian Ocean in the Age of Abolition and Empire (University of California Press). Her previous works include the books, For God and Mammon: Evangelicals and Entrepreneurs, Masters and Slaves in Territorial Kansas, and From Slavery to Poverty: The Racial Origins of Welfare in New York, 1840-1918, as well as numerous articles in anthologies and scholarly journals like the American Historical Review, Journal of Negro (African American) History, Civil War History, and Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art.

A Reading Featuring Asian American Alumni of Brooklyn College’s Creative Writing Programs

Jai Chakrabarti

Author

Jai Chakrabarti's short fiction has appeared in numerous journals and has been anthologized in The O. Henry Prize Stories, The Best American Short Stories, and awarded a Pushcart Prize. Chakrabarti was an Emerging Writer Fellow with A Public Space and received his MFA from Brooklyn College. He was born in Kolkata, India, and now splits his time between Brooklyn, NY and the Hudson Valley. A Play for the End of the World is his first novel.

jaichakrabarti.com

Cherry Lou Sy

Lecturer, Department of English, American Studies Program | Brooklyn College

Cherry Lou Sy a writer, playwright, and performer originally from the Philippines. Her work has been developed/presented in La Mama Experimental Theatre Club, Rising Circle Theater Collective, Letter of Marque Theater Co., Brooklyn College, the Primary Stages Einhorn School of Performing Arts, Wild Project, The Brick, The Classical Theatre of Harlem, The Tank, and The Public Theater. She was a finalist/semifinalist for the The Public Theater’s 2020 Emerging Writers Group, 2020 Thomas Barbour Playwrights Award, 2020 Pipeline Theater’s PlaySpace program, 2020 Ars Nova Fellowship, the 2018 SPACE on Ryder Farm’s Working Farm residency, and the 2017 Bay Area Playwrights Festival, and nominated for the 2018 Cherry Lane Theatre’s Mentor Project. She performed and devised in Ping Chong’s Undesirable Elements series and received her M.F.A. in playwriting from Brooklyn College, where she is also a lecturer in the Department of English and the American Studies program. She is a proud teaching artist of PEN America's DREAMing Out Loud, a program for undocumented and formerly undocumented writers. She is co-artistic director of Trade Co Theater.

Madeleine Thien

Professor, Department of English | Brooklyn College

Madeleine Thien is the author of four books of fiction, which have been translated into more than twenty-five languages. Do Not Say We Have Nothing, her most recent novel, received Canada's two highest literary honours, the Giller Prize and the Governor-General's Literary Award for Fiction, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, the Women's Prize for Fiction, and the Folio Prize. Her essays have been published in The New York Review of Books, Brick, The Guardian, The New York Times, Granta, and elsewhere. She teaches literature and writing at Brooklyn College. As a 2021 New York Public Library Cullman Fellow, Thien will be working on her fifth book, The Happiness of the Many, set in the Pearl River Delta and spanning the past and future.

Yun Wei

Author

Yun Wei received her MFA in poetry from Brooklyn College and studied at Georgetown University and London School of Economics. Her awards include the Geneva Literary Prizes and Himan Brown Poetry Fellowship. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in Michigan Quarterly, Shenandoah, Summerset, Poetry Northwest, Wigleaf, Word Riot, along with many other journals. Her debut novel is represented by Levine Greenberg Rostan Literary Agency. She works in global health in Switzerland, where she relies on chocolate and tears to survive mountain sports.

thepomegranateway.blogspot.com

Asian Americans in the BC Archives

Miriam Deutch

Associate Professor, Librarian, Open Educational Resources Program Director | Brooklyn College

Since proposing the Open Educational Resources (OER) zero textbook cost initiative at Brooklyn College in 2015, Miriam Deutch has collaborated with faculty in redesigning courses with OER as well as advancing teaching and learning with open pedagogy and digital humanities/scholarship initiatives. She promotes open scholarship and provides guidance on matters related to scholarly communication. She is a co-founder of the Brooklyn College COVID-19 Archive @ A Journal of the Plague Year.

Abby Heath

Student | Brooklyn College

Abby Heath is a senior at Brooklyn College concentrating in "Intersectionality of Latinx Immigrants". Her interests stem from her many years working in the service industry and the vast inequalities that exist there. This semester Abby is working with Professor Wills on the "Brooklyn College Student Experiences, Activism, and Post-Graduation Lives, 1975-forward" archive as an independent study, with a focus on the history of the Multicultural Action Committee on campus. Abby is from Boulder, Colorado.

Niara Johnson

Student | Brooklyn College

Joshua Leonard

Student, Department of English | Brooklyn College

Joshua Leonard is a second-degree transfer student studying Creative Writing with a focus on Fiction and a passion for Literary Horror. At Brooklyn College he has served as Chief-of-Format for the literary magazine The Junction, president of Riverrun, and intern for the English Majors’ Counseling Office. He is working with Prof. Cherry Lou Sy on an MTRSP interview project looking into Asian American activism at Brooklyn College from 1995 to the present. He lives with his husband and two cats on the Upper West Side.

Anunna Meem

Student, Education and History | Brooklyn College

Hello, My name is Anunna Meem, I am a junior at Brooklyn College. I am majoring in Education and History. My hobby is Bollywood dancing. Fun fact: I used to perform when I was in high school. My goal is to become a history teacher, specifically for English language learners and immigrant students. I would love to teach at one of the international high schools in New York City once I am certified. I am very excited to be in this panel and share some interesting findings of Brooklyn College.

Anum Momin

Student | Brooklyn College

Bridget Squitire

Student, Department of Film | Brooklyn College

Bridget Squitire is a film major at Brooklyn College. After expressing their interest in Asian civil rights in her class, professor Cherry Lou Sy reached out to them asking for their participation in the Mellon Transfer Student Research Program. They are, along with Professor Sy and other students, researching Asian American activism in the last 25 years at Brooklyn College, and the urgency of establishing an Asian American Studies Program.

The Secret History of Academic Disciplines

Yana Kuchirko

Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology | Brooklyn College

Rhea Rahman

Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology | Brooklyn College

Rhea Rahman is an assistant professor of anthropology at Brooklyn College - City University of New York. Her research engages global racial formations in relation to histories and enactments of Islamic practice and Muslim identity. Asking what it means to ‘do good’, her research in Europe, Africa, and the U.S. employs an intersectional analysis of the material, ethical, and political manifestations and implications of global humanitarianism. Drawing theoretical insights from Black feminist thought and indigenous studies, her work situates ideas and practices surrounding Islam, Africa, and Blackness within a historicized, politicized context.

Christopher Richards

Assistant Professor, Department of Art | Brooklyn College

Christopher Richards is an assistant professor in African art history at Brooklyn College. His research focuses primarily on dress and fashion in Ghana and South Africa. He is the author of Cosmopolitanism and Women's Fashion in Ghana (2021) and guest-curated the exhibition Kabas and Couture: Contemporary Ghanaian Fashion (2015).

Sophia Suarez

Professor, Department of Biology | Brooklyn College

Before 1492: Comparative Premodern Colonialisms

Lynda R. Day

Professor, Department of Africana Studies | Brooklyn College

Lynda R. Day earned a Ph.D. in African history from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and is currently a professor of African history at Brooklyn College. Her awards include a Fulbright Fellowship, a Five Colleges Women’s Research Center Fellowship and Endowed Chair of Women and Gender Studies. She has travelled to eleven African countries but has lived and conducted research in Ghana and Sierra Leone. She has published numerous articles on women in African societies and is the author of Gender and Power in Sierra Leone, the Last Two Hundred Years and Making A Way to Freedom: A History of African Americans on Long Island.

Jason Frydman

Associate Professor, Department of English | Brooklyn College

Jason Frydman is associate professor of English and comparative literature at Brooklyn College, The City University of New York, where he has also directed the Caribbean Studies interdisciplinary program. He is the author of Sounding the Break: African American and Caribbean Routes of World Literature (University of Virginia Press). His essays, on topics including Muslim slave writing in the Americas, reggae and dancehall culture in the Cold War, and comparative memory of Caribbean slavery and the Holocaust, have appeared in such journals as Small Axe, Interventions, and Critical Arts, as well as the edited volumes The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of Global Slavery, The Global South Atlantic, and The Routledge Companion to World Literature.

Hyunhee Park

Associate Professor, History | John Jay College and the Graduate Center, CUNY

Hyunhee Park (Ph.D. Yale University) is an associate professor of history at John Jay College and the Graduate Center, the City University of New York. She specializes in the history of cross-cultural contacts in East Asia and the Islamic world, in Sino-Islamic contacts in particular, in the Mongol Empire, and global history, focusing on information/knowledge transfers, including transfers of geographical knowledge, foodways, and distillation technologies. She authored Mapping the Chinese and Islamic Worlds: Cross-Cultural Exchange in Pre-Modern Asia (2012), Soju: A Global History (2021), and 30 articles for academic journals and edited volumes.

Brian P. Sowers

Assistant Professor, Department of Classics | Brooklyn College

Brian P. Sowers is assistant professor of classics at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York. His diverse research interests focus on early Christianity, late antique literature, and gender and reception studies. He has published on late Latin reading communities, early Christian female martyrs, saints, and poets (Perpetua, Felicitas, Thecla, Justina, Aelia Eudocia, Ausonius, and Proba), and the use of ancient literature to resist systemic racism and white supremacy in the US. His first book, In Her Own Words: The Life and Poetry of Aelia Eudocia (2020, Center for Hellenic Studies) examines the poetry of Aelia Eudocia, one of antiquity’s best surviving female authors.

The New Nativism

Alan A. Aja

Professor and Chair, Department of Puerto Rican and Latino Studies | Brooklyn College

Alan A. Aja is professor and chair in the Department of Puerto Rican and Latino Studies. Aja's research focuses on the structures, causes and consequences of economic stratification at inter and intra-group levels and bold policy level responses as intervention. His publications include the book Afro-Latinos in the U.S. Economy with Michelle Holder (Lexington Books, 2021) and Miami's Forgotten Cubans: Race, Racialization and Local Afro-Cuban Experience (Palgrave-McMillan, 2016). He has independent and collaborative pieces in the Washington Post, Boston Review, Rolling Stone, Teen Vogue, Education Week, the Nation, Dissent, the American Prospect, Latino Rebels and other publications. Aja is a scholar-activist for federal to municipal level job guarantees. He advised on the award-winning documentary The Sentence by Rudy Valdez. Before academia, Aja was a labor organizer in Texas. He is currently on the Board of Directors for the National Jobs for All Network.

Beaudelaine Pierre

Assistant Professor, Women’s Studies | St. Catherine University

Beaudelaine Pierre is assistant professor in Women’s Studies at St. Catherine University. Her work focuses on the study of race, indigeneity, immigration, and creolized- decolonial worlds from the lifeworlds of Afro/Diasporic/Caribbean women. She is the author of You May Have the Suitcase Now (New Rivers Press, 2021), the co-editor, with Nataša Ďurovičová, of How to Write an Earthquake / Comment écrire et quoi écrire / Mou pou 12 Janvye (AHB, 2011). Pierre is currently at work on a new project on the transformative and resistant infrapolitics of Temporary Protected Status holders in the Youwès.

Chandan Reddy

Associate Professor, Gender, Departments of Women and Sexuality Studies and Comparative History of Ideas | University of Washington

Chandan Reddy is associate professor in the departments of Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies and the Comparative History of Ideas at the University of Washington, Seattle. He is co-editor (with Jodi Byrd, Alyosha Goldstein, and Jodi Melamed) of the special issue, “"Economies of Dispossession: Indigeneity, Race, Capitalism," Social Text (Spring 2018). His book, Freedom With Violence: Race, Sexuality and the U.S. State (2011) from Duke University Press won the Alan Bray Memorial award for Queer studies from the MLA as well as the Best Book in Cultural Studies from the Asian American Studies Association, both in 2013.