Colloquium Series

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

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