Every year AAST hosts or cosponsors a variety of speakers and special events. These include the IU Arts and Humanities Council’s China Remixed and India Remixed festivals; the Day of Remembrance in commemoration of the World War II era incarceration of Japanese Americans; and external speakers for the Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity Speaker (CRRES) Series.
Asian American Studies participates in the College’s Majors and Minors Expo each August.
Our program has helped bring many distinguished visitors to campus, providing access to their thinking about issues of compelling interest on topics such as immigration and social justice.
Ai-Jen Poo is executive director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance (NDWA) and co-director of Caring Across Generations. An award-winning activist, thought leader, and social innovator, she is a leading voice in domestic workers’ rights and family care advocacy. A winner of a 2014 MacArthur Fellows Award, she was a keynote speaker for Themester 2015, @Work: The Nature of Labor on a Changing Planet.
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Deepa Iyer is a South Asian American activist, writer, and lawyer. Iyer’s areas of expertise include the post- 9/11 America experiences of South Asian, Muslim, Arab and Sikh immigrants, national security and immigration policies, and racial equity and solidarity practices. Her first book, We Too Sing America: South Asian, Arab, Muslim and Sikh Immigrants Shape Our Multiracial Future (The New Press 2015), received a 2016 American Book Award and was selected as a top 10 multicultural non-fiction book of 2015. She spoke at IU in February 2017 on the subject of how South Asian and Middle Eastern communities have dealt with the aftermath of the domestic war on terror.
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Viet Thanh Nguyen is the author of the Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Sympathizer. Known as a cultural critic whose work examines the lives of refugees of the Vietnam War, he was a MacArthur Fellow in the class of 2017. He spoke at IU in October 2017, as a visitor for the Themester term Diversity, Difference, and Otherness.
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The College of Arts