Recent News

Gov. Jay Inslee signed legislation Wednesday officially making Lunar New Year a recognized legislative holiday in the state of Washington. Although Washington’s newest state-recognized holiday is not a paid day off for those who celebrate, Rep. My-Linh Thai said this moment still sends a message of belonging to Asian Americans. Lunar New Year celebrations include Tết in Vietnam, Seollal in Korea, and Spring Festival in China. Because the holiday is based on the lunar calendar, it doesn’t fall… Read more
The Temple University Press announced on their website the forthcoming Spring 2024 release of Linh Thủy Nguyễn's new book, Displacing Kinship: The Intimacies of Intergenerational Trauma in Vietnamese American Cultural Production. The announcement reads Displacing Kinship examines how Vietnamese American cultural productions register lived experiences of racism in their depictions of family life and marginalization. Second-generation texts illustrate how the children… Read more
On Friday, April 19th, Dr. Jang Wook Huh will present how translation facilitated the migration of Western notions of Blackness to Korea at the turn of the twentieth century. In particular, he examines the serialized Korean adaptation of Booker T. Washington's Up from Slavery in which American missionaries employed sentimentalism to transform a locally situated concept of race into a portable, widely applicable, "master category." Here is the… Read more
On March 11th, in New York, Dr. LaShawnDa Pittman attended an event as a panelist for the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women. The event's title is "Daughters as Change Agents: The Power of Mothers, Grandmothers, & Aunts." The goal of this United Nations-CSW68 parallel event was to raise the awareness of the impact of the mother, grandmother, and women in a young girl's life.
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In anticipation of the 2026 FIFA World Cup where several games will be played in Seattle, The Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies and their partners have created the Global Sport Lab. The Global Sport Lab aims to provide students and the public opportunities to learn about global sport and global connections through the expertise of our faculty, staff, guest speakers and community engagements. For UW students, the Lab will work to support and highlight courses covering a range of… Read more
The winter issue for the Equity, Justice, and Inclusion newsletter has been published. Scroll down to the bottom and you'll see AES' very own LaShawnDa Pittman in this quarter's EJI Spotlight! This spotlight shares her work on grandparent caregiving in her new book Grandmothering While Black: A Twenty-First-Century Story of Love, Coercion, and Survival. LaShawnDa has worked to make her scholarship public and accessible for the people who would benefit from it most, such as through her… Read more
Yesterday, the University of Washington held its annual Distinguished Staff Award reception for individuals and teams in the following categories: Collaboration, Innovation, Impact, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, and Career Achievement. President Ana Mari Cauce spoke at this year's reception alongside the award's executive sponsor and Vice President for Human Resources Mindy Kornberg and other campus leaders. One of the many nominees is AES' very own Anjélica Hernández-Cordero! The category… Read more
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Professor Rick Bonus, Chair of the American Ethnic Studies Department, is cited in this interview with Lillian Castillo-Speed, head of the Ethnic Studies Library at the University of California, Berkeley, and Gary Colmenar, subject librarian for ethnic studies at University of California, Santa Barbara. Over the years, Lillian and Gary have been very active in promoting ethnic studies programs and collections in librarianship. This interview conversation centers on Lillian's and Gary's… Read more
The Lunar New Year is based on the moon's phases and not the traditional calendar so it falls on a different day every year - usually sometime between the end of January and middle of February. This year, the holiday fell on Saturday, Feb. 10, 2024. Many Asian countries celebrate it, and some traditions are shared, while some are not. For example, Koreans don't seek out oranges. Instead, they make it a point to eat rice cake soup or ddeokguk. It's thought you don't age another year until you… Read more
On January 27, 2024, the OCA Greater Seattle - Asian Pacific American Advocates hosted an event called the Golden Circle Awards 2024. At this event, the Golden Circle Award was presented to Alan Lau, Bea Kiyohara, Larry Matsuda, and the American Ethnic Studies Department. Additionally, attendees enjoyed a Lunar New Year Celebration with a 10-course dinner! A recent update, on March 7th, the University of Washington's College of Arts & Sciences published a Fellows, Futurists, & More… Read more