CURRENT EVENTS

APRIL 2008

April 15-16, 2008. Southeast Asians in the Diaspora

MARCH 2008

March 7-8, 2008. Philippine Palimpsests: Filipino Studies in the 21st Century

FEBRUARY 2008

February 27, 2008. The Balgopal Lecture on Human Rights and Asian Americans. John Manzon-Santos will be the inaugural speaker. Mr. Manzon-Santos is former executive director of Asian & Pacific Islander Wellness Center in San Francisco; founding executive director of Asian & Pacific Islander Coalition on HIV/AIDS in New York; co-founder of The Audre Lorde Project, community organizing center for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Two-Spirit, Transgender People of Color; Principal of pearldiving, a consulting practice; and a Buddhist practitioner in the tradition of Thich Nhat Hanh..

Wednesday, February 13, 2008. 1:00 PM. Asian American Cultural Center. Victor Mendoza Lecture: Coldness, Cruelty, and a Dandy Makeover: Philippine Insurrectos and the Sublime Object of U.S. Imperial Desire

Wednesday, February 6, 2008. 2:00 PM. Asian American Cultural Center. Caroline Yang Lecture.

JANUARY 2007

Wednesday, January 30, 11am-1pm, Asian American Studies Program Building and Asian American Cultural Center Lounge: We invite you to an informal gathering with the Asian American Studies faculty. Come learn about the AAS courses and new research in the field. Become involved in shaping the future of the Program!.

NOVEMBER 2007

Wednesday, November 28, 2007. Public Lecture by Lisa Nakamura, Associate Professor, Asian American Studies and Communications Research. Asian American Cultural center lounge Noon-1:00PM. Topic: ’Ni Hao: A Gold Farmer’s Story’: Racializing Asian Virtual Labor in World of Warcraft.

OCTOBER 2007

Wednesday, October 17, 2007. Public Lecture by Vivek Bald, Filmmaker, Scholar, and Electronic Musician. Asian American Cultural center lounge Noon-1:00PM. Topic: Overlapping Diasporas, Multiracial Lives: South Asian Muslims in U.S. Communities of Color, 1880-1950.

Tuesday, October 16, 2007. Film screening. Mutiny: Asians Storm the British Music. Directed by Vivek Bald, Produced by Claire Shanley & Vivek Bald, 217 Noyes Lab, 7:00 PM. Discussion by Mimi Nguyen. Q & A with Director to follow.

APRIL 2007

Friday, Apri 27, 2007. Public Presentation by Dr. Madeline Hsu, Director, Center for Asian American Studies, University of Texas-Austin. Details TBA.

Thursday, April 19, 2007. Public Presentation by Teresa Pyon, Graduate Student, Educational Policy Studies. Recipient of 2005-2006 Jeffrey S. Tanaka Asian American Studies Grant. 2:00-3:00 PM, Asian American Cultural Center. Topic TBA

MARCH 2007

Thursday, March 15, 2007. Stan Thangaraj, Recipient of the 2005-2006 Jeffrey S. Tanaka Asian American Studies Grant. 2:00-3:00 PM, Asian American Cultural Center. Topic: "Out of Bounds": Indo-Pak Basketball, the basketball court, and the politics of location, space, and place for the South Asian Diaspora

Tuesday, March 6, 2007. Public Presentation by Dr. Eleana Kim, Postdoctoral Fellow, UCLA Center for Korean Studies (includes a class visit to AAS 450 Korean Americans). 2:00-3:00 PM, Asian American Studies Conference Room. Topic: Reckoning Kinship, Recasting Diaspora: Transnational Adoptees Of and In the Korean Nation.

Friday, March 2, 2007. Tenth Anniversary Celebrations of the Asian American Studies Program. 1:00-6:45 PM. Knight Auditorium, Spurlock Museum.

• Two panel sessions on the history of the Program and vision for the future.

• Keynote speaker K.W. (Kyung Won) Lee, award-winning investigative journalist and UIUC alumnus (MA, Journalism, c/o 1955)

• Light reception to follow.

FEBRUARY 2007

Tuesday, February 20, 2007. Public Presentation by Dr. Jung-Sun Park, Associate Professor, Asian-Pacific Studies, California State University-Dominguez Hills (includes a class visit to AAS 250 Korean Americans). Time (tentative) 2:00-3:00 PM, Asian American Studies Conference Room. Topic: Korean American Youths and Trans-Pacific Cultural Flows.

Wednesday, February 15, 2007. Stan Thangaraj, Recipient of the 2005-2006 Jeffrey S. Tanaka Asian American Studies Grant. 2:00-3:00 PM, Asian American Cultural Center. Topic: "Out of Bounds": Indo-Pak Basketball, the basketball court, and the politics of location, space, and place for the South Asian Diaspora - POSTPONED due to school closing.

Monday, February 5, 2007. Asian American Poetry Seminar. 11:30-12:30PM. Asian American Cultural Center. Timothy Yu (University of Toronto) and Guicang Li. Asian American poetry studies is enjoying a rebirth in the new millenium. Critical work that examines masculinity and transnationalism, politics and form, and history and culture breathes new light into Asian American Studies scholarship. Guicang Li and Timothy Yu will present thir work and participate in a timely dialogue about the future of work on Asian American poetry.

Friday, February 2, 2007. Public presentation by Dr. Leslie Bow, Director, Asian American Studies Program, University of Wisconsin-Madison. Time 12:00 Noon-1:00 PM. Asian American Cultural Center. Topic: Anxieties of the 'Partly Colored': Racial Interstitiality in the Jim Crow South.

NOVEMBER 2006

Wednesday, November 15, 2006. 12:00 Noon-1:00 PM. AACC Lounge. Lisa Nakamura Lecture: "Mixedfolks.com: 'Ethnic Ambiguity,' Celebrity Outing, and the Internet". Open to the public. Dr. Nakamura is Associate Professor in Speech Communication and Asian American Studies.

Monday November 6, 2006.12:00 Noon-1:00 PM. AACC Lounge. Shelley Lee will present a public lecture on ""The Contradictions of Cosmopolitan: Consuming the Orient at the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition and the International Potlatch Festival, 1909-1934." Dr. Lee is a postdoctoral fellow with Asian American Studies.

OCTOBER 2006

Thursday-Saturday, October 26-28. Bodies & Spectacles: a Conference on Asian American Performance. Organized by Esther Kim Lee and Yutian Wong. Click here for website.

SEPTEMBER 2006

Thursday, September 7, 2:00-4:00 PM, 1208 W. Nevada Street in Urbana: Asian American Cultural Center and Asian American Studies Joint Open House. Programming beings at 2:30 PM. Refreshments provided.

Friday, September 15, 1:00-2:00 PM, Asian American Cultural Center Lounge, 1210 W. Nevada Street in Urbana: Dr. Larry H. Shinagawa will give a talk, "From California to East of California: Observations on Asian American and Ethnic Studies." Dr. Shinagawa is the Director of Asian American Studies and Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of Maryland.

Click here for a listing of past events.

FACULTY ACCOMPLISHMENTS

Martin F. Manalansan IV, Associate Professor of Anthropology and Asian American Studies has been elected co-chair of the Society of Gay and Lesbian Anthropologists and as board member of the Association of Feminist Anthropologists.

Susan Koshy, Associate Professor of English and Asian American Studies, received the 2005 Choice Outstanding Academic Title Award for her book, Sexual Naturalizations: Asian Americans and Miscegenations.

Sumi Okazaki has been appointed as an Advisory Board member of the American Psychological Association's Minority Fellowship Program.

Manisha Desai has been elected President-Elect of Sociologists for Women in Society.

Nancy Abelmann, Associate Professor of Anthropology and AAS, has been selected by the Society for Urban/National/Transnational Anthropology as the winner of the 2004 Leeds Prize for outstanding contribution to urban anthropology for her book The Melodrama of Mobility: Women, Talk, and Class in Contemporary South Korea. She will also be the Director of the Center for East Asian and Pacific Studies starting in Fall 2005.

Pallassana Balgopal, Professor Emeritus of Social Work, has been invited to serve as a Fulbright Senior Specialist at Viswa Bharti University in Shantiniketan. In 2000 he served as a Senior Fulbright Fellow and helped redesign the Social Work curriculum. His upcoming assignment will be to evaluate the revised curriculum. This university was established by the Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore who read his famous book of poems Geetanjali at the Channing Murray Foundation at the UIUC campus.

Lisa Cacho, Assistant Professor in AAS and Latina/o Studies, will be a Center on Democracy in a Multiracial Society fellow for the 2005-2006 year.

Augusto Espiritu, Associate Professor of History, published Five Faces of Exile: The Nation and Filipino American Intellectuals in 2005 by Stanford University Press.

Susan Koshy, Associate Professor of English and AAS, published Sexual Naturalization: Asian Americans and Miscegenation in 2005 by Stanford University Press.

Kent A. Ono has released two new books: Asian American Studies After Critical Mass (2005) and A Companion to Asian American Studies (2005), both by Blackwell Publishing.

Junaid Rana, Assistant Professor of AAS, will be an Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities fellow in the 2005-2006 year.

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