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Colloquium Series
All events are held in Hart Hall 3201 at 4pm unless otherwise noted. All are welcome.
Click the drop down boxes for dates, speakers, and webinar registration links.
Fall 2026 Colloquia
Cultural Studies PhD students enrolled in CST 290 must attend four events and submit colloquium papers for three events.
November 5, 2026
Cruz Medina - "Sanctuary: Exclusion, Violence, and Indigenous Migrants in the East Bay"
This talk stems from three years of participant-observer research as a volunteer English language teacher at an East Bay church with a predominantly Maya Guatemalan population. Demonstrating the inherent "messiness" of decolonial frameworks (Itchuaqiyaq and Matheson 2021), Medina disentangles the layers of colonial legacy a part of teaching English to a displaced Indigenous group of adult students in the context of a church not far from the influence and wealth of Silicon Valley. Medina asks what are the limitations of teaching in a community literacy space? And how do we reconcile perpetuating the literacy myths of social mobility while working with vulnerable communities?
Cruz Medina is Professor of Rhetoric and Composition at Santa Clara University and faculty with the Bread Loaf School of English for Middlebury College. He teaches writing courses in the LEAD Scholars first-generation college program, and he teaches advanced writing courses on rhetoric, new media, comics, and storytelling. He was a co-author on the 2026 revision to the WPA Outcomes Statement and Position Statement for the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) on Media Education in English Language Arts in 2022 and 2026. Cruz served as co-chair of the National Council of Teachers of English/CCCC Latinx Caucus from 2017-2021 and served on the Educator Advisory Committee for the Tech Interactive Museum in San Jose. He co-edited Racial Shorthand: Coded Discrimination Contested in Social Media in 2018 for Computers and Composition Digital Press/University of Utah Press. In 2024, his book Sanctuary: Exclusion, Violence, and Indigenous Migrants in the East Bay was published by the Ohio State University Press. He is currently resisting AI in his teaching and researching the intersection of fascism, rhetoric, and Brazilian jiu-jitsu.
Thursday, 4-6pm, Hart Hall 3201
November 19, 2026
Allison Tait - "The House That Family Money Built"
The House That Family Money Built exposes how poverty governance and wealth management, the legal regimes governing credit and debt, work in tandem to extract money upward from low-income families and concentrate it in dynastic ones. The book traces this system across three axes: the legal rules that govern borrowing and default, the geographies of privilege and poverty they produce, and the narratives that make the whole arrangement appear inevitable. This book reveals the legal blueprint that produced the house of family money - a complex edifice of inequality - and tracks the outcomes of the inhabitants.
Allison Tait is the Dennis I. Belcher Professor of Law at the University of Richmond where she teaches trusts and estates, family law, and seminars about the law and political economy, the "meaning of money," and family abolition. Professor Tait's research addresses the regulation of family and household economies and the ways in which the regulation of "family money" produces complex forms of inequality.
Thursday, 4-6pm, Hart Hall 3201
Winter 2026 Colloquia
Cultural Studies PhD students enrolled in CST 290 must submit colloquium papers for four events.
January 14, 2026
Cathy Lihn Che - Reading and Screening
Please join poet and filmmaker Cathy Linh Che for a screening of her short film and a reading from her latest poetry collection.
Cathy Linh Che is a writer and multidisciplinary artist. She is the author of Becoming Ghost (Washington Square Press, 2025), a Finalist for the National Book Award, Split (Alice James Books) and co-author of the children’s book An Asian American A to Z: a Children’s Guide to Our History (Haymarket Books). Her video installation Appocalips is an Open Call commission with The Shed NY, and her film We Were the Scenery won the Short Film Jury Award: Nonfiction at the Sundance Film Festival. She teaches as Core Faculty in Poetry at the low residency MFA program in Creative Writing at Antioch University in Los Angeles and works as Executive Director at Kundiman. She lives in New York City.
We Were the Scenery is a short documentary based on the experiences of writer Cathy Linh Che’s parents, two Vietnam War refugees who, while in a refugee camp in the Philippines, were utilized as background extras in Apocalypse Now. We Were the Scenery premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2025 and won the Short Film Jury Prize: Nonfiction. It has been selected for the 2025 DOC NYC Short List and the 2026 Cinema Eye Honors Shorts List. Runtime: 15 minutes / Vietnamese with English subtitles
Becoming Ghost, 2025 National Book Award Finalist, documents Cathy Linh Che’s parents’ experiences as refugees who escaped the Vietnam War and then were cast as extras in Francis Ford Coppola’s film Apocalypse Now, placing them at the margins of their own story. The poetry collection uses persona, speculation, and the golden shovel form as a means of moving Vietnamese voices from the periphery to the center. The speaker’s disownment raises questions about the challenges of using parents as poetic subjects, telling familial stories to a broader public, and the meaning of forgiveness. Scribner, 128 pages.
Wednesday, 5pm, Cruess 1003
Sponsored by Creative Writing, Cinema and Digital Media Studies, Cultural Studies, and Asian American Studies
January 22, 2026
The Refugee, The Deportee, and The Student
Featuring Keva X. Bui and Mimi Thi Nguyen, moderated by Natalia Duong
In the United States, the axiom freedom isn’t free. It functions as the operative logic of state violence – and some must pay its price. On the one hand, war as murderous intent, and as violent event, is external to the self-image of “America” as an agent of perpetual peace. On the other, war as the promise of continuity is vital to life’s prolongation into the future, which is to say, society must be defended. In this schema, others wage wars, and America must finish them to secure freedom, finally. This conversation between Keva X. Bui and Mimi Thi Nguyen considers three figures called upon to pay the price for that freedom – the refugee, the deportee, and the student – as central to the multiple crises that constitute the art of racial governmentality under the aegis of US empire. From the violent suppression of dissent to the unlikely subjects caught in webs of complicity with war’s everyday maintenance, this conversation reflects on how the burden of empire’s freedom unfolds in an ever-increasing militarized world.
Keva X. Bui is Assistant Professor of Asian American Studies and the Council for Race and Ethnic Studies at Northwestern University. They are a scholar of everyday war and empire, examining how we live and experience war at multiple scales of being. Their first book-in-progress, Disarming Empire: Race and Anti-War Critique in US Cold War Weapons Culture, is a critical race and feminist science and technology studies account of US Cold War weapons development, illustrating how weapons of mass destruction are co-constitutive of racial and militarized logics central to US empire in the post-WWII era. Their writing has appeared/is forthcoming in Journal of Asian American Studies, Frontiers, Amerasia, Verge: Studies in Global Asias, Journal of Transnational American Studies, and The Sage Encyclopedia for Refugee Studies.
Mimi Thi Nguyen is Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Dartmouth College. Her first book, called The Gift of Freedom: War, Debt, and Other Refugee Passages, focuses on the promise of “giving” freedom concurrent and contingent with waging war. Her second book is called The Promise of Beauty, which considers beauty as a fruitful concept through which we engage narratives of crisis. She is also co-editor with Patty Ahn, Michelle Cho, Vernadette Vicuna Gonzalez, Rani Neutill, and Yutian Wong for Bangtan Remixed: A Critical BTS Reader (Duke University Press, 2024); co-editor with Mariam Lam and Fiona I.B. Ngo of a special issue of positions: asia critique on Southeast Asian American Studies (20:3, Winter 2012); and co-editor with Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu of Alien Encounters: Pop Culture in Asian America (Duke University Press, 2007). She has also published in Signs, Camera Obscura, The Funambulist, Women & Performance, positions, Radical History Review, and ArtForum, and her papers have been solicited for the Feminist Theory Archive at Brown University.
Thursday, 4:00pm-6:00pm, Hart Hall 3201
Sponsored by Asian American Studies and Cultural Studies
January 29, 2026
Crystal Mun-hye Baik - Before the Fire Dogs Steal the Sun: An Elegy
In this book talk, Professor Crystal Mun-hye Baik (sher/her) will share from her forthcoming book Before the Fire Dogs Steal the Sun (Duke University Press, April 2026). Before the Fire Dogs Steal the Sun is an intimate cultural history of war, illness, banishment, and estrangement told through the experiential lens of Baik's family. Beginning with her father's death and mother's psychiatric hold in 2022, Baik situates her parents’ lives within the enmeshed narratives of Japanese colonialism, war, and transoceanic migration, examining Korean diasporic grief as a felt form of thinking and writing, rather than an object of study. In doing so, she reckons with diasporic genealogies of precarity that have configured the everyday lives of her parents and ancestral communities. Blending different genres from narrative prose to visual essay, epistles to ancestral mourning rites, Before the Fire Dogs Steal the Sun is a meditation on the personal and ethical entanglements scholars must confront when they are implicated in the histories of violence they study.
Crystal Mun-hye Baik (she/her) is the chair of and an associate professor in the Department of Gender and Sexuality Studies at UC Riverside. As a feminist oral historian, writer, and memory worker currently residing in the unceded land of the Tongva and Cahuilla peoples, Professor Baik is deeply committed to ethical forms of memory stewardship that center communities, land, and solidarity. Her second book, Before the Fire Dogs Steal the Sun: An Elegy, is forthcoming with Duke Univresity Press (April 2026).
Thursday, 4:00pm-6:00pm, Hart Hall 3201
Sponsored by Asian American Studies and Cultural Studies
February 5, 2026
Corrie Decker - The Age of Sex: Custom, Law, and Ritual in Twentieth-Century East Africa
The Age of Sex examines shifting ideas about age and maturity in Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania from the era of British colonialism to the 1970s. It argues that the stereotypes about rites of passage shaped colonial and postcolonial efforts to implement legal chronological age standards such as the age of consent and the age of criminal responsibility. These efforts ushered in what the author calls the "age of sex,” defined as the moment of maturation when girls were declared capable of having sex (evidenced by their puberty or sexual awareness) and when boys earned the right to have sex (evidenced by their circumcision or survival of other pain rituals marking acceptance of new responsibilities). From the initiation camp to the courtroom, rituals of maturation instilled and reconstructed ideas about gender, age, and personhood that have lasting effects in East Africa today.
Corrie Decker is a professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at the UC Davis. She works on the history of gender, sexuality, childhood and youth, and the history of development in Africa. She is the author of Mobilizing Zanzibari Women: The Struggle for Respectability and Self-Reliance in Colonial East Africa (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) and The Age of Sex: Custom, Law, and Ritual in Twentieth-Century East Africa (University of Wisconsin Press, 2025), and coauthor (with Elisabeth McMahon) of The Idea of Development in Africa: A History (Cambridge University Press, 2020).
Thursday, 4:00pm-6:00pm, Hart Hall 3201
Sponsored by Cultural Studies and Gender, Sexuality and Women's Studies
February 19, 2026
Nicholas Shapiro and Sunny Xiang - Air Conspiracies
Air Conspiracies brings together two distinct but resonant bodies of work to examine air, atmosphere, and breath as sites of harm, power, and possibility. Sunny Xiang's current project asks how U.S. military interventions in Asia and the Pacific during the mid-twentieth century shaped the racialized and gendered perception of comfort and security on the one hand and environmental and toxicological exposure on the other. Placed into conversation with Nicholas Shapiro’s new book Homesick and his ongoing research on helicopter policing in South Los Angeles, the event traces how militarized ways of sensing the air migrate into domestic spaces, emergency housing, and everyday urban life. Together, the projects ask: What happens when the atmosphere becomes a medium of governance—whether through chemical drift, low-altitude surveillance, or the slow violence of toxic homes? And how might air inform our methods of study, styles of attention, and modes of being? Air Conspiracies invites audiences to consider how communities interpret these atmospheric pressures, how they theorize accountability and harm, and how they craft counter-knowledges.
Sunny Xiang is a professor of English and American Studies at Yale who draws on wide-ranging aesthetic, cultural, literary, and documentary materials to study and teach U.S. military empire in Asia and the Pacific. Her research is specifically interested in how historical norms for perceiving race and gender have interacted with the sensory economy of colonial violence and militarized security. Her book Tonal Intelligence: The Aesthetics of Asian Inscrutability During the Long Cold War was published in 2020.
Nicholas Shapiro is an associate professor of biology and society at UCLA. He was trained as a medical anthropologist at Oxford, and cross-trained through postdocs in environmental monitoring and Indigenous feminist research methods. Shapiro publishes across anthropology, public health, environmental engineering, and public facing venues. His research and teaching have been recognized with numerous honors, including the UCLA Public Impact Research Award. He directs the Carceral Ecologies lab, advancing research at the intersection of environment, health, and justice.
Thursday, 4:00pm-6:00pm, Hart Hall 3201
Sponsored by Asian American Studies and Cultural Studies
Spring 2026 Colloquia
Cultural Studies PhD students enrolled in CST 290 must submit colloquium papers for four events
April 23, 2026
Dr. AJ Bauer - "Beyond Bias"
Drawing from his forthcoming book Making the Liberal Media: How Conservatives Built a Movement Against the Press (Columbia, 2026), A.J. Bauer tracks the rightward shift of structural media criticism in the United States in the late 1940s and early 1950s. He contends that bias discourse—attempts to theoretically or empirically prove or disprove media bias—relies on an unwarranted faith in exposure. Bias claims assert that political disagreement is fundamentally an epistemological problem—that if only people had “the facts” they would see the world, and share the political interests, of the claimant.
While the idea of “liberal media” bias has played a central role in modern conservative movement strategy and identity formation, progressive and journalistic attempts to respond have too often failed by accepting the claim’s core premise. What would it look like to reject bias discourse outright? Instead of endlessly debating the ideological and normative slants of various media, what if we saw bias for what it is—an acknowledgment of ideological disagreement, and an invitation into a distinct practice of worldbuilding.
A.J. Bauer is an assistant professor of journalism at the University of Alabama. He holds a PhD in American Studies from New York University. He is co-editor of News on the Right: Studying Conservative News Cultures (Oxford, 2019) and the author of Making the Liberal Media: How Conservatives Built a Movement Against the Press (Columbia, 2026).
Thursday, 4:00pm-6:00pm, Hart Hall 3201
May 7, 2026
Dr. Leisy Abrego - "Seeking Sanctuary, Finding Breath: On Salvadorans’ Silence, Voice, and Stories"
In yet another political moment of xenophobic hate in the United States, immigrants are seeking sanctuary. What might sanctuary look like when present scenes are reminiscent of war in another place in another time? Rooted in the history of Salvadoran migration to the United States and in the questions that braid conversations across generations, this talk will consider the persistent force of breath. It keeps us alive, sustaining silence, voice, and storytelling—all of which preserves our dignity and serves as a form of sanctuary.
Leisy Abrego is Professor in the Department of Chicana/o and Central American Studies at UCLA. She is inspired by the possibility of liberatory spaces in the classroom, in community with colleagues, and in accompaniment of immigrant communities and movements in research. She is a member of the first large migration of Salvadorans who arrived in Los Angeles in the early 1980s. She aspires to be a good guest on Tongva lands. Her research and teaching interests are in Central American studies and law & society. She writes about the intimate consequences of U.S. empire and immigration policies for Central American migrants and Latine families in the United States. Her books include Sacrificing Families: Navigating Laws, Labor, and Love Across Borders (Stanford University Press, 2014), Immigrant Families (co-authored with Cecilia Menjívar and Leah Schmalzbauer, Polity, 2017), and We Are Not Dreamers: Undocumented Scholars Theorize Undocumented Life in the United States (co-edited with Genevieve Negrón-Gonzales, Duke University Press, 2020). She also supports and advocates for refugees and immigrants by writing editorials and pro-bono expert declarations in asylum cases.
Thursday, 4:00pm-6:00pm, Hart Hall 3201
May 14, 2026
Dr. Summer Kim Lee - "Spoiled: Asian American Hostility and the Damage of Repair"
In this talk, Professor Summer Kim Lee discusses her book, Spoiled: Asian American Hostility and the Damage of Repair (Duke UP, 2025), which engages with contemporary Asian American artists who challenge expectations that their work should repair the wounds of racial trauma. Recent Asian American cultural production has been praised for being healing, nurturing, caring, and therapeutic. Why is this what we have come to desire and expect from Asian American artists and cultural production? What assumptions are we making about what processes of repair should feel like? By turning to the “spoiled,” Kim Lee looks to the work of Asian American artists who attend to the painful, destructive dimensions of repair, as integral to the kinds of healing Asian Americans seek.
Summer Kim Lee, Associate Professor of English at UCLA
Introduction by Christine Imperial, Response by Professor Vivian Huang at San Francisco State University
Sponsored by Asian American Studies, Cultural Studies, and the Mellon Foundation
Thursday, 4:00pm - 6:00pm, Hart Hall 3201
May 21, 2026
Dr. Samiha Rahman - "Black Muslim Freedom Dreams: Islamic Education, Pan-Africanism, and Collective Care"
Black Muslim Freedom Dreams: Islamic Education, Pan-Africanism, and Collective Care chronicles the dreams, sacrifices, struggles, and joys of a multi-generational community of Black Muslims in the Tijani Sufi tariqa who live, learn, and strive for liberation between the United States and Senegal. The book argues that their experiences are oriented towards collective care – an Islamic and Black radical way of being and belonging through which believers journey on the path towards Allah’s love by caring for one another and addressing the material inequities that constrain their communities.
Dr. Samiha Rahman is an Assistant Professor of Human Development at California State University Long Beach. She holds a Ph.D. in Africana Studies and Education from the University of Pennsylvania. Her scholarship examines how young people and their families engage race, religion, and education to achieve justice and liberation. Her research has garnered supported from the Mellon Foundation, the Institute of Citizens and Scholars, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Spencer Foundation, the National Academy of Education, and the Fulbright-Hayes. Her scholarship has been published in Anthropology & Education Quarterly, The Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Africa, The Journal of Negro Education, and Curriculum Inquiry, among others.
Thursday, 4:00pm-6:00pm, Hart Hall 3201
May 28, 2026
Dr. Julie Hua - Book Talk: In Conversation with Denise Ferreira da Silva
In Conversation with Denise Ferreira da Silva is an interdisciplinary reading companion of Silva's work – and its reckoning with the persistence of global racial violence – designed to help scholars, students, artists, and activists better engage in a global idea of race.
Julie Hua is professor of Gender, Sexuality and Women's Studies and co-editor, with rashne limki, of In Conversation with Denise Ferreira da Silva (Bloomsbury, forthcoming June 2026).
Thursday, 4:00pm-6:00pm, Hart Hall 3201
Colloquium Series