Evening Lecture Series

2011 - 2012 Biographies

Linda T. Chin, Esq. has practiced law for over twenty years.  She served as the Counsel to the President at Hunter College for over 16 years, practiced corporate law at Con Edison and served as General Counsel for the New York State Judicial Commission on Minorities.  Presently, Ms. Chin is an Assistant Professor of Legal Studies at St. John's University where she teaches Employment Law, Social Security Disability Law, and Elder Law.

Professor Chin received her Bachelor of Arts Degree from the City College of New York and her Juris Doctor from Brooklyn Law School.

 

Wellington Chen is Executive Director of the Chinatown Partnership Local Development Corporation.

Wellington is a highly respected public servant and long-time community advocate, urban planner and urban affairs specialist. As senior consultant/advisor of the Planning Advocacy Group for the past decade, Mr. Chen--a long-time Flushing resident--has been deeply involved in numerous community projects, including the downtown Flushing revitalization plan. Wellington was also the first Asian American to serve as a Commissioner on the New York City Board of Standards and Appeals. Mr. Chen co-founded Tri Plus Construction Corporation in 1989, a company dedicated to creating affordable housing in New York City.

An architect by training, Wellington worked for renowned architect I.M. Pei from 1980 to 1985. He has been a member of Community Board 7Q for over 13 years, and currently sits on a dozen other boards, including the City University of New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Queens Economic Development Corporation, and Asian American / Asian Research Institute.

Wellington was born in Taiwan and grew up in Singapore, Hong Kong and Brazil.

 

Fay Chiang has been a poet, visual artist, community and cultural activist in NYC Chinatown and the Lower East Side for the past 40 years. At the Basement Workshop (the first Asian American nonprofit multidisciplinary cultural organization in NYC and the east coast) she began as a volunteer for the Yellow Pearl project and Bridge Magazine and moved on to coordinate and develop Amerasia Creative Arts in 1973 and became its executive director from 1974 to 1986. Director of Henry Street Settlement’s Asian American Outreach Program; project manager/special sections editor in NY Newsday’s Public Affairs Office, and director of Poets & Writers’ Readings/Workshops state-wide re-grant program, she joined Project Reach in 2000 and is currently working in program development, crisis counseling for young people at risk and supporting youth and adults living with HIV/AIDS.

Author of 3 volumes of poetry: 7 Continents 9 Lives published in 2010 by Bowery Press and In The City of Contradictions, and Miwa’s Song by Sunbury Press in 1979 and 1982 respectively. Her poetry and prose have been published nationally and internationally in numerous poetry anthologies and literary magazines including: The Bowery Poetry Cafe Women’s Poetry Anthology, Mamapalooza/The Mom Egg, Amerasia Journal, Tribes Magazine, Voci Dal Silenzio (I Canguri/Feltrinelli, Milan), Changer L’Amerique: Anthologie de la Protestaire USA (La Maison de la Poesie, Rhones-Alps) Girls: An Anthology (Global City Press), Quiet Fire, (Asian American Writers Workshop, NY), Ordinary Women (Ordinary Women Books, NY), American Born and Foreign, (Sunbury Press, NY).

A recipient of a New York State CAPS Poetry grant, a Revson Fellowship at Columbia University, a Lifetime Achievement Award from New York University’s Asian/Pacific American Studies Department as well as The Five Colleges, MA, Fay has taught poetry, visual arts and playwriting as an artist in residence in venues including the 63rd Street Y’s Writers Voice, Plays for Living, Project Reach, Art in General and Dramatic Risks.

A fine arts student at Hunter College of CUNY, she received a Bachelor of Arts from the School of Visual Arts in New York City. As a Revson Fellow at Columbia University, she studied scriptwriting and film history. In 2003-2004, she was the artist in residence at New York University’s Asian/Pacific/American Studies program, where she worked on her book-length poem Chinatown, and participated in classroom discussions and public programming. In 2004-2007 as a visiting scholar under the auspices of NYU/APA’s program, she continued her research work for “Chinatown”; and worked on a book-length poetry manuscript, “In This Life”, based on her conversations as a breast cancer survivor with a friend living with AIDS. October 2011, she was a fellow at the Gardarev Center, Boston where she continued work on “In This Life” and started work on her memoir.

In Spring/Summer 2006, she completed: archival recordings of her work with Jack Tchen and Jason Hwang at NYU/APA; and a one-act play, “Two Boots and a Ball Gown”, that was read at NYU/APA September 2006. Fall 2007 she began co-production of a documentary by Mark Waren on the Café Cino, the seminal theater (1958-68) that catalyzed the Off-Off Broadway, experimental and gay theater movements in New York City’s East and West Village.

A frequent speaker at colleges and community based organizations, Fay has also begun making visual art and exhibiting again after a 3 decade break consumed by arts administration, parenting and battling breast cancer since 1994. She has had 7 major bouts/surgeries in the past 17 years.

A volunteer for Zero Capital, Orchard Street Arts and Advocacy, October 22nd Coalition Against Police Brutality, and a board member for nonprofits: BorderStatements, When I Walk, and Dramatic Risks, Fay lives in the East Village and is mother of the inimitable Xian.

 

Margaret M. Chin joined the Sociology Department at Hunter College/CUNY in September 2001, and is the author of Sewing Women: Immigrants and the New York City Garment Industry (Columbia University Press, 2005).

Professor Chin’s research interests focus on new immigrants, working poor families, race and ethnicity, and Asian Americans. Her current research projects include a book manuscript on how Asian ethnic media is used by first and second generation Asians and Asian Americans; a comparative chapter on differences and similarities among Brooklyn’s Chinatown, Flushing’s Asiantown and Manhattan’s Chinatown; and a paper how young student parents balance parenting and school.

Professor Chin was a Social Science Research Council Post Doctoral Fellow in International Migration, a Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation Junior Faculty Career Grant Recipient and a Gender Equity Project Associate. She has taught The Sociology of the Family, The Second Generation Experience of Asians, Latinos and Blacks, the Graduate Social Research course in qualitative research methods, and a CUNY Honors College Seminar – The Peopling of New York.

Professor Chin received her BA in Applied Mathematics from Harvard University and her MA and PhD in Sociology from Columbia University.

 

Chiwan Choi is a writer, editor, teacher, and publisher. He has been a member of the Los Angeles Poets & Writers Collective since 1989. His poems and essays have appeared in numerous journals and magazines, including ONTHEBUS, Esquire, Chiron Review, and CIRCA. Chiwan’s first major collection of poetry, The Flood, was published by Tía Chucha Press in April, 2010. 

His students and clients have had various works published in the past couple of years, including the bestseller, Upper Cut, by Carrie White (Atria Books).

After a two-year stint in New York, where he received an MFA in Dramatic Writing from the Tisch School at NYU, Chiwan returned to Los Angeles where he and his wife, Judeth Oden, launched a new publishing company to feature Los Angeles writers, Writ Large Press, in March 2008.

Chiwan's new poetry collection, Abductions, is due out at the end of February 2012 and he is also finishing up Exit to Hope Street, a collection of short stories.

 

Alyson Cole is Associate Professor of Political Science at Queens College and the Graduate Center, where she has been based since 2002. She is the recipient of the 2008 President’s Award for Excellence in Teaching, and her research and teaching interests bridge political theory and American politics/culture. Cole’s work links central questions of political thought—especially formulations of justice, the nature of subjugation, and the possibility of resistance or change—with an examination of concrete political ideologies, rhetoric, and law/policy-making, emphasizing aspects of subject-formation, gender and race/ethnicity. Cole is the author of The Cult of True Victimhood: From the War on Welfare to the War on Terror (Stanford University Press, 2007). Her articles have appeared in Signs, American Studies, Feminist Studies, the Michigan Law Review, and the National Women’s Studies Association Journal. She is on the editorial boards of Women’s Studies Quarterly and International Journal of Criminology and Sociological Theory. Currently, Cole is working on a new project on affective labor.

 

Yunah Hong is an award-winning video/filmmaker, based in New York City.  She grew up in Seoul, Korea. She studied art history, photography and design at the Seoul National University, graduating in 1985. Two years later she earned an M. A. in computer graphics at the New York Institute of Technology. While working as a designer in New York, she began to experiment with video.  She has now made seven films, ranging in scale from a one-hour documentary to short experimental productions.

Her first work, “Memory/all echo” (1990), is an experimental video based on the Dictée by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha.  It was broadcasted on CUNY-TV in 1991 and has been distributed to libraries and universities throughout the U.S.  Her second “Through the Milky Way” (1992), is an experimental video evoking the experience of Korean women immigrants in Hawaii at the turn of the century. It was awarded First Prize in Video Art at the 1992 Tam Tam International Video Festival in Italy and broadcast on WNYC-TV. Her short film, “Here Now” (1995), frames a day in the life of a woman who, at age 30, finds her mind bouncing between fantasy and reality.  It was awarded the Special Jury Award at the 2nd Seoul Short Film Festival in Korea 1995.  Her feature screenplay, “Monday”, was an official selection of PPP 1998: Pusan International Film Festival Film Market in Korea.

Her documentary, “Becoming an Actress in New York” (2000) is about three Korean American actresses who pursue their big dreams in New York.  It was broadcasted in Korea in 2001 and 2004.  It was named a final nominee for aMedia’s 2001 Ammy Awards for Best Documentary.  Her documentary, “Between the Lines: Asian American Women’s Poetry” (2001) brings forth how the lives of Asian American woman poets are reflected in the poetry they produce.  It received a CINE Golden Eagle Award in 2002.  It has received critical acclaim and has been exhibited throughout the States.

Over the past nineteen years since she became a video/filmmaker, her video/films have focused on women, and the arts. She has worked on various genres of film and video -- experimental, drama, computer animation and documentary -- to explore the possibilities of video/film form and new ways to visualize personal stories and history.  Currently, she is in the final stage of finishing a new documentary, “Anna May Wong: In Her Own Words” which will combine her previous experience of working in both documentary and fiction filmmaking to create a memorable portrait of Wong’s extraordinary life.   She also published an article about Wong, “A Twentieth Century Actress” with Peter X Feng in Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Routledge in 2006.

She is a recipient of the New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship in video (2000, 1992), the Media Alliance Media Arts fellowship (1993), and the Art Matters fellowship (1995).  She received funding from the New York State Council (2004, 2002, 1999 & 1995), the Jerome Foundation (2006, 1994), the Asian Women Giving Circle (2009), Urban Artist Initiatives (2008) and the Pyramid Arts Center's Diverse Forms Artist Project (1992).  She also received a media fund and a James Yee mentorship award from Center for Asian American Media in 2008 and 2005.

She served as video grant advisor to the New York Foundation for the Arts (2004-8).

 

Wen Jin is an Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. Dr. Jin received her BA from Fudan University, Shanghai, and PhD from Northwestern. She specializes in twentieth-century American literature; Asian American literature; narratology; theories of race, ethnicity, and (trans)nationalism; Sinophone literature; and twentieth-century Chinese literature. 

Dr Jin recently completed a book, Pluralist Universalism: An Asian Americanist Critique of U.S. and Chinese Multiculturalisms, which compares fictions of multiculturalism from the U.S. and China in the post-Cold War era.  She has also been published in Contemporary Literature, American Quarterly, Critique (forthcoming), and the edited collection, Minority Serial Fictions.  She has written articles in Chinese as well, and is a Chinese co-translator of Hemingway’s True at First Light (Yiwen, 2000). Her new project investigates the intersections of secular magic and cognitive theories of narrative impact.

 

Aruni Kashyap is a writer from India’s north-eastern state of Assam. Most of the world know about Assam for its tea plantations. But very few know that this Indian state which produces two-third of the world’s tea has been reeling under an armed secessionist resistance movement against the Indian state since 1979. Due to the strong campaign of disinformation that the Indian government has been encouraging ever since the Assam-India conflict started, very less about this humanitarian crisis is discussed even in the Indian media. Aruni’s fiction and poetry deals with these issues in complex ways and they have appeared in journals such as Tehelka, Pratilipi, Indian Literature, Muse India, Live Mint : the Wall Street Journal, Himal Southasian, The Houston Literary Review, etc.

His debut novel The House With a Thousand Novels, that is due in July 2012 has received immense pre-publication interest from the Indian media. The novel tells the story of a family in an Assamese village during the secret-killings of the late 90s. The secret-killings were a series of extra-judicial executions of families and members of the rebel organisation ULFA allegedly conducted by the Indian government to weaken the insurgency. Reminiscent of the Dirty War in Argentina, this horrific event in India’s history was rarely reported in the media.

Aruni’s poems have been anthologised in the Oxford Anthology of Writings from North-East India (Oxford UP) and Writing Love: An Anthology of Indian English Poetry (Rupa Publications, Delhi). He is currently completing his second novel while attending the MFA program at Minnesota State University, Mankato.

 

Shazia Khan is a General Assignment Reporter for NY1 News. Shazia has covered everything from the September 11th attack and its aftermath, to arts and entertainment issues, to cultural and lifestyle stories.

Having reported and produced a variety of segments, Shazia’s favorites include those celebrating the city's cultural and religious diversity. In 2005, she served as mistress of ceremonies at Gracie Mansion to help launch Immigrant History Week with Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

A second generation Indian-American, the Westchester County native graduated from New York University with a BA in Broadcast Journalism. In 2006 she won a South Asian Journalists award for her profile of the Bangladeshi community in New York City.

She credits her accomplishments to the support of her parents, Rasheed and Shamsa Khan.

 

Chungmi Kim, a Korean-American poet and playwright, is the author of poetry books, Glacier Lily (2004) and Chungmi—Selected Poems (1982), and also a screenplay, The Dandelion, which received the first place Open Door Writing Award from the Writers Guild Foundation, West. Her poetry has been included in numerous anthologies and featured on Garrison Keillor’s National Pubic Radio program The Writer’s Almanac and in Poetry Society of America’s “Poetry In Motion” program in Los Angeles. Ms. Kim received an Emmy nomination as co-producer of “Korea: The New Power in the Pacific,” a documentary for KCBS-TV. Her play, Comfort Women, was produced at Urban Stages in New York and consequently published in New Playwrights The Best Plays of 2005 by Smith and Kraus. Its translated version in Korean, Nabi/Comfort Women, was produced at the Seoul Theatre Festival in Korea and also in Vancouver and Toronto in Canada with English and Chinese subtitles. Ms. Kim is a member of the Dramatists Guild of America.

 

Susan S. Kim, M.D. is a rheumatology fellow at Hospital for Special Surgery. She has focused her research endeavors in understanding health disparities and chronic illness in the systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) population. Her current project is examining the relationship between health-related quality of life and the concept of social capital, which is an expansive concept that includes facets such as sociability, social networks, trust and reciprocity, community and civic engagement, in SLE patients. Dr. Kim received her Bachelor of Arts degree in Sociology at Williams College in Massachusetts, her medical degree from the New York Medical College, and completed her Internal Medicine residency at the New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center.

 

Kyoo Lee is currently Assistant Professor of Philosophy at John Jay College, CUNY, where she is also affiliated faculty for Gender Studies and Justice Studies Programs. In addition, she teaches courses and leads faculty seminars in feminist and critical theories at the CUNY Graduate Center, where she started as a Mellon Faculty Fellow (2009-2010).

Dually trained in Continental philosophy (Warwick Univ.) and literary theory (London Univ.), Kyoo Lee publishes widely in the intersecting fields of the theoretical Humanities such as Aesthetics, Asian American Studies, Comparative Literature/Philosophy, Continental Philosophy, Critical Race theory, Cultural Studies, Deconstruction, Feminist Philosophy, Gender Studies, Poetics, Post-phenomenology and Translation. Her first and forthcoming book is titled Reading Descartes Otherwise (Fordham University Press), which explores Cartesian alterities such as blindness, madness, dreaminess and badness, in that order; currently, she is working or else sitting on a few other “alterities” projects, including one that looks at intersectional differences between xenophobia(/philia) and racism.

 

Eliza Ngan-Dittgen, B.A. is the Program Associate at LANtern (Lupus Asian Network) since 2010.  In this capacity, she assists in the coordination of program activities with community-based agencies, with the goal of raising awareness and knowledge about lupus.  Prior to this, she was a volunteer Peer Health Educator for the program for seven years.  Ms. Ngan-Dittgen uses her personal experience with lupus coupled with her knowledge gained over the years to increase public awareness of this illness especially within the Chinese community.  Eliza is fluent in Chinese and received her BA from the University of Toronto and Hospitality Diploma from Switzerland.

 

Yoon Jung Park is a Visiting Scholar-in-Residence at Howard University, and a non-resident Senior Research Associate of the Sociology Department at Rhodes University. Dr. Park obtained her PhD from the University of the Witwatersrand (Sociology); MA from Fletcher School at Tufts University (International Relations); and BA from Pitzer College (Sociology and Women’s Studies).

Dr. Park is the author of A Matter of Honour. Being Chinese in South Africa (Jacana/Lexington Books) and numerous other articles and book chapters in scholarly publications including Les Temps Modernes, African Studies, and the Journal of Chinese Overseas.

Her current research interests include Chinese in southern Africa and perceptions of Chinese by local communities; migration; race, ethnicity and identity; race, class and power dynamics; and xenophobia. She also has done work on issues of gender and gender-based violence in the US and South Africa, international development, and arts & culture.

 

Mohammad Razvi is the Executive Director and Founder of Council of Peoples Organization (COPO). He was born Pakistan and emigrated with his parents to the United States when he was six years old. Following the attacks of September 11th, Mohammad founded COPO to help Arabs, South Asians and Muslims in New York City with the backlash they were experiencing. Today, COPO continues to support, empower, and educate these communities and help them strengthen bonds with their larger multi-cultural city and beyond.

 

Falguni A. Sheth is an Associate Professor of Philosophy and Political Theory at Hampshire College. Professor Sheth holds a B.A. in Rhetoric and minor in South Asian Studies from UC Berkeley, and an M.A. and Ph.D. from the New School for Social Research. She works in the areas of continental philosophy, political philosophy and legal theory, critical race theory and philosophy of race, post-colonial, theory, and sub-altern and gender studies.

Professor Sheth has published numerous articles and two books, Race, Liberalism, and Economics(coedited, U. Michigan Press, 2004) and Toward a Political Philosophy of Race(SUNY Press, 2009). Her most recent book argues that racial divisions are fundamental to polities, and argues this point through the examples by exploring the situation of Muslims and Arabs, the caste system, the practice of veiling, and the history of liberalism.

Professor Sheth's current research is in several areas: hybrid subjectivity and race; Foucault’s biopolitics in the context of legal subjectivity; the emergence and legal construction of Punjabi-Mexicans at the turn of the 20th century; and the metaphysics of misrecognition. Sheth has served on the Immigrant Rights Commission of San Francisco and Hampshire College's Board of Trustees, and is an organizer of the California Roundtable for Philosophy and Race.

 

Robert Teranishi is Associate Professor of Higher Education at New York University and Principal Investigator for The National Commission on Asian American and Pacific Islander Research in Education, a project funded by the College Board and USA Funds. He is also a faculty affiliate with The Steinhardt Institute for Higher Education Policy and a consultant for the Ford Foundation’s "Advancing Higher Education Access and Success" initiative. Prior to joining the faculty at NYU, Teranishi was a National Institute of Mental Health postdoctoral fellow at the W.E.B. DuBois Institute at the University of Pennsylvania,

Teranishi's research is broadly focused on race, ethnicity, and the stratification of college opportunity. His work has been influential to federal, state, and institution policy related to college access and affordabiity. Teranishi has provided congressional testimony regarding the Higher Education Reauthorization Act and No Child Left Behind, informed state policy decisions related to selective college admissions, and his research has been solicited to inform U.S. Supreme Court decisions on affirmative action and school desegregation. 

Teranishi is the recipient of the 2010 Martin Luther King, Jr. Faculty Award from NYU and was recently named one of the nation's top "up-and-coming" leaders by Diverse Issues in Higher Education. His most recent book published by Teachers College Press is Asians in the Ivory Tower: Dilemmas of Racial Inequality in American Higher Education.

 

Mingmei Yip was born in China, received her Ph.D. from the University of Paris, Sorbonne, and held faculty appointments at the Chinese University and Baptist University in Hong Kong. Dr. Yip is the author of Peony Pavilion (2008), Petals from the Sky (2010), and Songs of the Silk Road (2011).  In addition to her English language novels, Dr. Yip has published five books in Chinese, written several columns for seven major Hong Kong newspapers, and has appeared on over forty TV and radio programs in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Mainland China, and the U.S. URL: www.mingmeiyip.com

 

Ying Zhu is Professor and Coordinator of Cinema Studies in the Department of Media Culture, and Director of Modern China/East Asian Studies Group at the College of Staten Island, the City University of New York. Prof. Zhu's writing has appeared in media journals, online publications and edited volumes in the US, China, and Europe. She is the author of Chinese Cinema during the Era of Reform: the Ingenuity of the System (2003) and Television in Post-Reform China: Serial Drama, Confucian Leadership and Global Television Market (2008); editor of TV China (with Chris Berry, 2009), amonst others and is co-producer of a TV documentary, "Google Verses China" for Dutch National TV. Her first major trade book on China Central Television, Two Billion Eyes is forthcoming.

Prof. Zhu is the recipient of American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship (2007-08) and of the 2006 Fellow of National Endowment for the Humanities. She co-curated “Chinese Film Retrospective” at New York’s Lincoln Centre in 2005 and contributed major articles to the China Studies blog of "the New York Times."

Prof. Zhu is currently working on a TV documentary about the revival of Confucius classics among Chinese college youth.

 

 


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