Join us for the first Noted Scholar Lecture of 2024.
Speaker:
Dr. Christopher B. Patterson in conversation with Dr. Mila Zuo
Wednesday, January 17, 2024
12:00-1:30 PM Pacific Time
DUE to weather, this event is now online only
Dr. Christopher B. Patterson will discuss his newly released prose-poetry book, Nimrods, in a conversation with Dr. Mila Zuo about poetry, pictures, and parents. Nimrods shamelessly mixes autotheory, queer punk poetry, musical ekphrasis, haibun, academic (mis)quotations, and bad dad jokes to present a bold new take on the autobiography: the fake-punk self-hurt anti-memoir.
Kawika Guillermo is an award-winning author and third generation Filipinx American whose family is primarily from Hawai’i and Texas. He has lived in Portland, Las Vegas, Seattle, Gimhae South Korea, Nanjing China, Hong Kong, and Vancouver Canada. His debut novel, Stamped: an anti-travel novel (2018), won the 2020 Association for Asian American Studies Book Award for Creative Prose, and was adapted into a free-to-play video game, Stamped: an anti-travel game, in 2023. His follow-up speculative fiction novel, All Flowers Bloom (2020), won the 2021 Reviewers Choice Gold Award for Best General Fiction/Novel. Kawika publishes academic work under his patrilineal/legal name, Christopher B. Patterson, where he works as an Associate Professor of The Social Justice Institute at The University of British Columbia. His research and teaching focus on literature, video games, and new media through the lens of Asian North American studies, critical race theory, and queer theory. His first academic book, Transitive Cultures: Anglophone Literature of the Transpacific (Rutgers University Press, 2018), won the American Studies Association’s 2020 Shelley Fisher Fishkin Prize for International Scholarship in Transnational American Studies, and his second academic book, Open World Empire: Race, Erotics, and the Global Rise of Video Games (New York University Press, 2020) was a runner-up for both the 2020 Speculative Fictions and Cultures of Science Book Award, and a finalist for the 2021 John Hope Franklin Publication Prize of the American Studies Association. His articles have appeared in Positions: asia critique, American Literature, Cultural Studies, American Quarterly, and other venues. He co-founded two educational podcasts: New Books in Asian American Studies (2013), and the Journal of Asian American Studies Podcast (2020), which are both still releasing new episodes today, and he is the co-editor of two anthologies forthcoming in 2024: Transpacific, Undisciplined (University of Washington Press), and Made in Asia/America: Why Video Games Were Never (Really) About Us (Duke University Press), co-edited with the games scholar Tara Fickle.
Dr. Mila Zuo is an associate professor in the Department of Theatre and Film at UBC, as well as the Graduate Advisor for the Cinema & Media Studies graduate programs. Her research areas include transnational Asian cinemas; film-philosophy; abject and enchanted epistemologies; star studies; digital and new media; and critical theories of gender, sexuality, and race and ethnicity.
Her book Vulgar Beauty: Acting Chinese in the Global Sensorium (Duke University Press, 2022) focuses on the affective racialization of Chinese women film stars, demonstrating the ways which vulgar, flavourful beauty disrupts Western and colonial notions of beauty. Accompanying research can be found in Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, Celebrity Studies Journal, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, Feminist Media Histories journal, and in various anthologies on contemporary cinema and media studies. In addition to her scholarly work, Zuo writes, directs, and produces narrative films, visual essays, documentaries, and music videos. Her short films have screened in international film festivals and universities, including Carnal Orient (2016) which premiered at Slamdance Film Festival, and her short narrative film Kin (2021), which was the recipient of the 2019 Oregon Media Arts Fellowship, and screened at HollyShorts Film Festival. She is currently working on her third film, Mongoloids, a hybrid docu-fiction project about the Chinese Cultural Revolution and its impacts across generations. This research creation work is supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council’s Insight Development Grant.
Co-presented with the Public Humanities Hub, UBC.
