Author and historian Judy Tzu-Chun Wu will present Carleton College’s Winter 2013-14 Herbert P. Lefler Lecture on Monday, Jan. 27 at 4:30 p.m. in Leighton Hall Room 305. Wu’s presentation, entitled “Eldridge Cleaver Goes to Pyongyang, Hanoi, and Peking: Afro-Asian Internationalism and Radical Orientalism,” is free and open to the public.
Wu is a professor of history and of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at Ohio State University. Her areas of research include modern U.S. history, women’s history, immigration history, history of comparative racialization, and race and sex. Wu is a co-editor of Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies and a member of the board of editors for the Journal of Women’s History. She also serves as a coordinator of the Asian American studies program and of a diversity studies collective at the Ohio State University.
Wu is the author of “Radicals on the Road: Internationalism, Orientalism, and Feminism during the Vietnam Era” (Cornell University Press, 2013), which focuses on the international travels of American antiwar activists during the U.S. War in Vietnam and how their encounters with Asian cultures and politics influenced their beliefs. Wu is also the author of “Doctor Mom Chung of the Fair-Haired Bastards: The Life of a Wartime Celebrity” (University of California Press, 2005), a biography of the first American-born Chinese female physician and political activist, Dr. Margaret Jessie Chung (1889-1959), through which Wu explores the shifting social norms of race, gender, and sexuality from the late Victorian era to the early Cold War period in U.S. society.
Wu earned an AB degree with honors and distinction, an AM degree and a PhD—all from Stanford University.
Carleton College’s Lefler Lecture Series, endowed by Herbert P. and Mary Jane Lefler, is designed to bring prominent historians to campus that have recently raised important conceptual questions relevant to the entire discipline of history. Recent Lefler lecturers have included Kate Brown, a Professor of History at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and Anita Guerrini, Horning Professor of Humanities and Professor of History at Oregon State University, Corvallis. The Lefler lectures have taken place each term since the fall of 1979.
The event is sponsored by the Herbert P. Lefler Lectureship, in collaboration with the Carleton College Department of History. For more information, including disability accommodations, call(507) 222-4217. Leighton Hall is located at the end of College Street on the Carleton campus.
