KJC Chair Quan Zhou in conversation with Wan Sonya Tang (Boston College) and Mary Kate Donovan (Skidmore College) about her work and how different contemporary media have influenced and impacted the expression of race issues in Contemporary Spain from a Sino-Spanish perspective.

Together, they will also discuss the relative absence of important role models in Spain (when compared to other national contexts) of artists and writers who critically engage and theorize issues of race and identity. In addition to a focus on Quan’s recent publications and blog, they will also address the medium of the podcast and the lack of racialized voices recorded in Spain today. By thinking across media and offering a comparative frame in which to situate Quan’s work, this event will contextualize Quan’s work through the lens of contemporary racialized media practices in and beyond Spain.

Co-sponsored by the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU and TNYU Department of East Asian Studies.

Thursday, February 8, 2024, 7:00 pm

KJCC, 53 Washington Square South

BIOS
Mary Kate Donovan is associate professor of Spanish and director of Media and Film Studies at Skidmore College, where she teaches courses on Spanish literature, cinema, and visual culture. Her research has been published in journals including The Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, the Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, and the Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, among others. Currently, she is working on a book manuscript that studies representations of the Chinese diaspora in contemporary Spain, a project that has been funded by the Fulbright U.S. Scholar program. She also co-organized a virtual speaker series during the height of the COVID19 pandemic, Pensando Xībānyá, which brought artists, activists, and educators of Chinese and Taiwanese descent in Spain together in conversation.

Wan Sonya Tang is Assistant Professor of Hispanic Studies and the Director of Asian American Studies at Boston College, where she teaches on a variety of topics relating to modern and contemporary Spanish literature and culture. Outside of BC, she is the treasurer of the Asociación Internacional de Galdosistas. She is the co-editor of Televising Restoration Spain: History and Fiction in 21st-Century Costume Dramas (Palgrave MacMillan, 2018), and of Approaches to Teaching the Works of Benito Pérez Galdós (under contract with the MLA). Her book Specters, Monsters, and the Damned: Fantastic Threats to the Social Order in 19th-Century Spanish Fiction, was completed with the support of a fellowship from the American Association of University Women, and is forthcoming with Vanderbilt University Press. Most recently, Wan has started a new research project relating to the Taiwanese author San Mao, and her travelogues on Spanish Sahara and the Canary Islands in the 1970s.