Gary served as CSER’s director from the Center’s formation in 1999 until 2007. He laid the groundwork for CSER to become Columbia’s only hub for comparative and interdisciplinary analysis of ethnicity, race, and Indigeneity, nationally recognized for its academic initiatives and transformative scholarship. CSER now serves over 100 undergraduate majors, minors, and M.A. students a year.
Gary’s 2016 book, Third World Studies: Theorizing Liberation (Duke University Press), contends that Ethnic Studies as it exists today has fallen short of its original mandate, which emphasized the interconnectedness of the struggles of all Third World peoples. This panel discussion brings together five of Gary’s former students who have gone on to become accomplished scholars in Ethnic and Asian American Studies. A number of our panelists were in conversation with Gary as graduate students during his years at Columbia.
In addition to his extensive scholarship, our panelists will discuss the histories of CSER and the field of Ethnic Studies more broadly, Gary’s scholarly contributes to Ethnic and Asian American Studies, and the new field of study envisioned by Gary as Third World studies. In doing so, they will be engaging in “a work of imagination,” envisioning possible futures for Ethnic Studies at Columbia and beyond.
Panelists:
Moon-Ho Jung is a Professor of History and the Harry Bridges Endowed Chair in Labor Studies at the University of Washington. He is the author of Coolies and Cane: Race, Labor, and Sugar in the Age of Emancipation (Hopkins Press, 2006), winner of the OAH Merle Curti Award, and the editor of The Rising Tide of Color: Race, State Violence, and Radical Movements across the Pacific (University of Washington Press, 2014). Most recently, he published Menace to Empire: Anticolonial Solidarities and the Transpacific Origins of the US Security State (University of California Press, 2022), which seeks to reconsider Asians within the American nation-state.
Susie J. Pak is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at St. John's University where she teaches U.S. American history (late-19th and 20th centuries). She specializes in the study of American business networks, and her research bridges the divide between social and economic history through the innovative use of quantitative and qualitative methods. Her book, Gentlemen Bankers: The World of J.P. Morgan, was published by Harvard University Press in 2013.
Vivek Bald is a scholar, writer, and documentary filmmaker whose work focuses on histories of migration and diaspora, particularly from the South Asian subcontinent. He is the author of Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America (Harvard University Press, 2013) and co-editor of The Sun Never Sets: South Asian Migrants in an Age of U.S. Power (NYU Press, 2013). His films include "Taxi-vala/Auto-biography" (1994) and "Mutiny: Asians Storm British Music" (2003).
Elda Tsou (GSAS ‘08) is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at St. John’s University. She offers undergraduate and graduate courses on Asian American literature, American ethnic literature, and literary theory. Broadly, her research explores the formal relationship between literature and society, particularly in the context of ethnic literature. She has published work on how the social formation is supplemented by literary interventions. Currently, she is completing a manuscript on Asian American critical reading practices.
Manu Karuka is an Associate Professor of American Studies at Barnard College, where he has taught since 2014. He studies imperialism and anti-imperialism, and he teaches courses on imperialism, Indigenous critiques of political economy, cultural studies, and liberation. He is the author of Empire’s Tracks: Indigenous Nations, Chinese Workers, and the Transcontinental Railroad (University of California Press, 2019). He co-edited a special issue of Theory & Event, “On Colonial Unknowing,” (Vol. 19, No. 4, 2016), as well as The Sun Never Sets: South Asian Migrants in an Age of U.S. Power (NYU Press, 2013)
