John Dewey Lecture
The 2007-2008 John Dewey lecture will be given by John Kuo Wei Tchen.
Time: 4 PM - 6 PM
Date: September 27, 2007
Location: Alumni Association of the University of Michigan
200 Fletcher Street
Ann Arbor, MI 48109
Directions
The John Dewey lecture is held annually by the Ginsberg Center in commemoration of Dewey's impact on American education through his writings on the role of experience in learning and problem-solving. The Dewey Lecture highlights the work of current scholar-activists by featuring nationally known figures engaged in public scholarship.
Since 1975, John Kuo Wei Tchen has been studying interethnic and interracial relations of Asians and Americans, helping to build cultural organizations, and exploring how inquiry in the humanities and society can help deepen the quality of public discourse and policy.
Dr. Tchen is currently Director of the A/P/A (Asian/Pacific/American) Studies Program and Associate Professor of History at New York University. He has written and spoken widely on museums, immigration, race relations, New York City, and cross-cultural studies.
In 1980, he and Charles Lai co-founded the New York Chinatown History Project that has enabled the largest Chinese settlement outside of Asia to document and explore its 160-year-long history and share it with hundreds of thousands of non-Chinese New Yorkers and visitors. Recently renamed the Museum of Chinese in the Americas, the museum has broadened its scope to document, analyze, and compare the diaspora of settlers and sojourners in North, Central and South America and the Caribbean.
Like his community-based work, Dr. Tchen's scholarship has focused on the history of Chinese immigrants. Dr. Tchen's most recent book is the award-winning New York Before Chinatown: Orientalism and the Shaping of American Culture, 1776-1882 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999). He has authored Genthe's Photographs of San Francisco's Old Chinatown (1984) which won an American Book Award (Before Columbus Foundation) and he has edited and introduced Paul C. P. Siu's classic study The Chinese Laundryman: A Study of Social Isolation (1987).
For this year's Dewey Lecture, Tchen will focus on how his academic scholarship and his community engagement complement and reinforce each other. His lecture will address a range of topics including community history, museum practice, transnational flows of people, current issues facing communities, and the production of knowledge.