Workshop on Afro-Asian Connections

Lunch will be provided. Please RSVP
https://duke.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_09FuAcQUisZDYgK

Speakers:

Kimberly Hassel is an Assistant Professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies and affiliate of the Asian/Pacific Studies Institute at Duke University. She is a Dominican American sociocultural anthropologist and digital ethnographer specializing in digital culture, youth culture, and identity in the contexts of Japan and its diasporas. She also specializes in Afro-Asia, with a particular focus on Afro-Japanese encounters in Black American popular culture and the Dominican Republic. Dr. Hassel's work has appeared in Anthropology News, Critical Asian Studies, Mechademia, The Nation Magazine, and Who Is The Asianist? The Politics of Representation in Asian Studies.

Selina Lai-Henderson is Associate Professor of American Literature and History at Duke Kunshan University, where she is the co-director of the Humanities Research Center. She is on the editorial board of the American Quarterly, and was the 2024-25 Hutchins Family Fellow in the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University.

J. Lorand Matory is the Lawrence Richardson Distinguished Professor of Cultural Anthropology and Director of the Sacred Arts of the Black Atlantic Project at Duke. He specializes in the study of spirit possession, gender, BDSM, transnationalism, and the university as a culture. He has been studying Chinese language and culture for six and a half years, with a focus on religion and BDSM.