The English Department is pleased to announce a lecture by Long Le-Khac of Stanford University, "Transnarrative Communities and the Aesthetics of Stereotype," Thursday, February 19, at 5:00 pm in 100-104 McKenna Hall. A reception will follow.
Long Le-Khac is a doctoral candidate in English at Stanford University. Before beginning his doctoral studies, Long taught English at Lee High School in southwest Houston. While there he built strong relationships with his students, most of whom were immigrants hailing from dozens of countries from Latin America to Southeast Asia. From his classroom where students’ extraordinary stories circulated alongside literary narratives, and from the stories of his family, who were dispersed by the Vietnam War, Long came to his current interests in race, diaspora, and narrative. His research focuses on contemporary Asian American and Latina/o literatures. His dissertation advances the nascent comparative scholarship on these literatures by theorizing their development of an increasingly important genre: story cycles and networked narratives. It argues that this form is powerfully suited to encompass diversity, map transnational experiences, and contest racist and nativist discourses, key challenges as Asian Americans and Latina/os reshape contemporary American culture.