Events Calendar

Lorena Oropeza

Lorena Oropeza studies people who during the 1960s raised hell because they wanted to stop a war, or fight racial injustice, or overthrow patriarchy. She was attracted to history as a field because, like those 1960s activists, she wishes to harness the subversive potential of history to interrogate received wisdom. A professor of history at the University of California, Davis, she is the author of The King of Adobe: Reies López Tijerina, Lost Prophet of the Chicano Movement about a Chicano movement leader who rewrote our understanding of the American West. She is also the author of ¡Raza Sí! ¡Guerra No!: Chicano Protest and Patriotism During the Viet Nam War Era that traces how and why Chicano movement participants came to contest American empire at home and abroad. In 2017, Oropeza received the American Historical Association Equity Award for her efforts to make the historical profession a more diverse and inclusive place.

Ersula

Ore

Ersula J. Ore is an associate professor of African and African American studies and rhetoric at Arizona State University. Her work examines the suasive strategies of aggrieved communities as they operate within a post-emancipation historical context. Her book “Lynching: Violence, Rhetoric, and American Identity” (University of Mississippi Press, 2019), Winner of the 2020 Rhetoric Society of America Book Award, explores lynching as a racialized practice of civic engagement that has, from the 1880s onward, communicated the meanings and boundaries of citizenship in the U.S. Professor Ore is a 2013 Institute for Humanities Research Fellow at ASU and a 2011 Penn State Alumni Association Dissertation Award Recipient. Her work can be found in the Women Studies in Commiunication, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, Quarterly Journal of Speech, Pedagogy, Present Tense, Rhetoric & Public Affairs and in Rhetorics of Whiteness: Postracial Hauntings in Popular Culture, Social Media, and Education (SIUP Press, 2016), Winner of the 2018 Conference on College Composition & Communication Outstanding Book Award in the Edited Collection.

David L. Eng is Richard L. Fisher Professor of English. He is also Professor in the Program in Asian American Studies, the Program in Comparative Literature & Literary Theory, and the Program in Gender, Sexuality & Women’s Studies. He is the recipient of research fellowships from the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, and the Mellon Foundation, among others. In 2016, Eng was elected an honorary member of the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (IPTAR) in New York City. His areas of specialization include American studies, Asian American studies, Asian diaspora, critical race theory, psychoanalysis, queer studies, gender studies, and visual culture. Eng is author of Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation: On the Social and Psychic Lives of Asian Americans (co-authored with Shinhee Han, Duke, 2019, winner of the Boyer Book Prize and Association for Asian American Studies Book Award Honorable Mention), The Feeling of Kinship: Queer Liberalism and the Racialization of Intimacy (Duke, 2010), and Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America (Duke, 2001). At Penn, Eng is a founding convenor of the Faculty Working Group on Race and Empire Studies as well as a member of the Executive Board of Gender, Sexuality & Women’s Studies and the Alice Paul Center. 

Hasia Diner is the Paul and Sylvia Steinberg Professor of American Jewish History at New York University, with joint appointment in the department of history and the Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies. She has built her scholarly career around the study of American Jewish history, American immigration and ethnic history, and the history of American women. She has written about the ways in which American Jews in the early twentieth century reacted to the issue of race and the suffering of African Americans, and the process by which American Jews came to invest deep meaning in New York’s Lower East Side. She is the author of We Remember with Reverence and Love: American Jews and the Myth of Silence After the Holocaust (2009), winner of a National Jewish Book Award and the American Jewish Historical Society’s Saul Viener Prize, and Roads Taken: The Great Jewish Migration to the New World and the Peddlers Who Led the Way (2015), a global history of Jewish peddling and Jewish migrations. She is a coeditor of 1929: Mapping the Jewish World (2013), winner of a National Jewish Book Award for anthologies. A Guggenheim Fellow, Diner has also written about other immigrant groups and the contours of their migration and settlement, including a study of Irish immigrant women and of Irish, Italian, and east European Jewish foodways.

Malinda Maynor Lowery

Malinda Maynor Lowery’s professional career began twenty-two years ago as a documentary film producer. In her film work she was concerned with transmitting knowledge visually and aurally to affect the viewer emotionally. I learned that conveying knowledge in multiple dimensions—visual, aural, written, interactive—is highly effective and changes minds and enhances skills, both for film audiences and for students. While in graduate school, she pursued a local oral history and photography preservation project in the Lumbee community. Lowery then went on to found a non-profit arts organization and produce an outdoor drama, Strike at the Wind!, about Lumbee history. These projects intensified her passion for doing academic and creative work that would advance articulated community needs. Community engagement has been the heart of her work in documentary film, theater production, and oral history. Initiating these projects required consultation with the communities involved, not as an afterthought or as a response to a problem, but as an integral element of the project design. By making films, establishing archives, writing books, producing historical drama, and teaching and mentorship, she has had an impact on how American Indian and American history is preserved and interpreted.

George Emilio Sanchez

George Emilio Sanchez is a writer, performance artist and social justice activist. He was born in Los Angeles, raised in Orange County, California, and became a New York transplant in 1978.  He began making original pieces in 1992 and has continued making performance work and social justice projects to this day. He is currently in the process of crafting a new performance series titled “Performing the Constitution.” The first installment of the series, titled XIV, will premiere at Dixon Place in June 2019. This work melds autobiography and history in a performance that gives narrative to the injustices racialized communities face as they fight for “equal protection of the laws.” The second performance in the series is titled In the Court of the Conqueror and confronts the over 200 year-old history of U.S. Supreme Court rulings that have diluted the Tribal Sovereignty of Native Nations. George’s work has been presented by theaters and museums in over 25 states and has received support from National Performance Network, the Fulbright Program (Peru), New York Foundation for the Arts, the Jerome Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation.