Chinese communities have called the U.S. South and Midwest home for over 150 years, but much of this history has been left out of mainstream Asian American narratives. This two-day workshop brings together scholars, students, educators, and community members to share strategies and highlight new and ongoing efforts to preserve and showcase this vital chapter of Chinese American history. A Comprehensive Approach to Sharing: This dynamic conference will include on-site paper sessions, roundtable discussions, film screenings, workshops, and community storytelling opportunities. The second day of the conference includes a day-long tour of the Mississippi Delta Chinese Heritage Museum in Cleveland, Mississippi, as well as optional tours of historic Chinese Cemeteries in the South. 

October 15–17, 2025 | Memphis, Tennessee

My presentation is linked below:

https://www.canva.com/design/DAG1375Nmvw/0fxcAzDrHiKWkL35h3q1kA/edit?utm_content=DAG1375Nmvw&utm_campaign=designshare&utm_medium=link2&utm_source=sharebutton

I am giving a workshop on digital methods for the humanities at the event below. Contact me for registration information.

Slides from presentation

Press coverage of the Douglas Conner Digital Project

WCBI Segment: https://www.wcbi.com/msu-students-research-legacy-of-starkvilles-first-black-physician/

Mississippi State University Newsroom https://www.msstate.edu/newsroom/article/2024/05/msu-students-digitally-preserve-legacy-one-starkvilles-first-black

Cyberchat sponsored by Global Asias Institute at Penn State. 12 April, 12 pm EST

Colonialism denies its allocation to the past. Its persistence demands that we ask how it has changed alongside exponential data accumulation, fast evolving mediums, accelerating advancements in artificial intelligence and machine learning, and the vast reaches of human networks. This workshop brings together scholars who use computational methodologies, who position the digital as objects, who challenge the replication of inequalities in the digital space, who trace continuities across mediums, who observe human-AI relations, and who question the digital infrastructures of scholarship. It aims to unite the tools and knowledges of multiple disciplines to train the eye on colonialism even as it dissipates into the cloud.

Taking our cue from the Black radical intellectual Cedric Robinson and his underappreciated status as a theorist of cinema and media, this conference addresses the multiple ways in which the analytic of racial capitalism must be brought to bear on media theory, media history, and media practice. Over the course of three days, we bring together an interdisciplinary group of scholars whose work helps elucidate the intimate entanglements between both historical and contemporary media and formations of racial capitalism.

First, Mediations of Racial Capitalism reflects on a range of intellectual traditions, activist genealogies, and aesthetic practices—ones that have often been marginalized within the field of media studies—concerned with the constitutively racial character of capitalism in its complex intersections with structures of settler colonialism, anti-Blackness, heteropatriarchy, and empire. Second, conference participants consider how an analysis of racial capitalism opens up further avenues for making sense of the media landscape in the present conjuncture and for responding to exigencies and struggles of our times. 

Confronting the ‘Global’, Exploring the ‘Local’: Digital Apprehensions of Poetics and Indian Literature(s)
21-22 December 2020, New Delhi

Digital Literary Studies in Uncertain Times: Digital Humanities and Literary Studies shared early synergistic interests in digital storytelling, digital archiving, and computational methods for literary research. In many regards, DH offered the democratizing potential of open access publishing, sharing texts and archives with broader and new audiences, and destabilizing canonical formations. Although these promises have been hindered by structural issues like funding and the hegemonic entrenchment of the Euro-American canon, I revisit these affordances of digital humanities methods and platforms in our present moment. Situating myself in the diasporic and trans/national contexts of India and the United States, I make a case for postcolonial and anti-caste praxis to ground our work in digital literary studies. This includes taking up the broader question of how DH practitioners can respond to socio-political emergencies in their local and national communities. Against the backdrop of a pandemic unfolding amidst state and systemic violence, DH scholars and teachers can enact radical and transformative practices and pedagogies at the intersection of digital humanities and literary studies.

Digital Archives in South Asian Studies: Towards Decolonisation

A panel discussion with Varsha Ayyar (Tata Institute of Social Sciences), Dhanashree Thorat (Mississippi State University), Amber Abbas (St. Joseph’s University), and Roopika Risam (Salem State University).

Panel moderated by Sneha Krishnan (University of Oxford) and Megan Eaton Robb (University of Pennsylvania). Registration link here

Oct 23, 2020 10:00 AM in Eastern Time (US and Canada)

This 2 day event features panelists from across the country and the OU community. Join us for two days of discussion on the state of digital humanities research and teaching. Moderated by Carrie Schroeder and Darren Purcell. Free and open to the public.

I will be speaking in session 1:

Session 1: Thursday October 22, 2-3:30PM CT
Moderated By Carrie Schroeder

Full video and powerpoint from the event will be uploaded later. Read more here.