"Art as a Vehicle for Change: a Conversation with Cathy Park Hong" with Chad Shomura.

Cathy Park Hong is professor and Class of 1936 Chair in the College of Letters and Sciences at the University of California – Berkeley. She is the author of three volumes of poetry — Translating Mo’um, Dance Dance Revolution, Engine Empire — and the award-winning collection of essays, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning. She is the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Pushcart Prize, and the Windham-Campbell Prize, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

Chad Shomura is assistant professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado, Denver. His research interests include political thought, affect, biopolitics, new materialism, and ecology. His recent publications are in Theory & Event, American Quarterly, Oxford Encyclopedia of Asian American Literature and Culture, and Empire and Environment: Ecological Ruin in the Transpacific. Chad’s current book project, A Life Otherwise, examines minor assemblies of life that upset the good life.

This event is part of the 2024-25 Tucker-Boatwright Festival of Literature and the Arts, “The Nature of Representation,” hosted by the English Department, and it is aligned with the Humanities Center theme question, “How (and why) do we represent nature.” The UR Humanities Centeroffers public events as well as intensive research and community-building programs, guided by our mission to collate and amplify humanities study. Please subscribe to the Humanities Newsletter to keep up with Center activities, and follow URHumanities on Instagram.