Hess Week begins on March 17 at 11 a.m. with a Welcome Ceremony honoring Jeung鈥檚 arrival on campus. The event brings together leading scholars and public intellectuals, including Carolyn Chen, Jerry Park, and David Kim, to reflect on the importance of scholarship that bridges research, community engagement, and social transformation.

Later that afternoon (2:15鈥�3:30 p.m.), the panel 鈥淭he Lives, Rights, and Civil Liberties of Asian Americans in an Age of Mass Deportation鈥� examines how contemporary immigration politics and policies are reshaping Asian American communities鈥攁nd how solidarities are forming across immigrant groups. Featuring voices from law, faith-based organizing, and community advocacy, this conversation centers the urgent realities facing families and communities today.

On March 18, Hess Week turns toward faith, story, and healing. In the morning (11 a.m.鈥�12:15 p.m.), 鈥淏elief and Belonging: Faith Communities and Justice鈥� explores how religious communities have become sites of resistance, refuge, and organizing in the struggle for immigrant dignity and human rights.

In the afternoon (2:15鈥�3:30 p.m.), 鈥淩ecuperating Collective Stories: Writing Chinese American Memoirs鈥� brings together memoirist Ava Chin and Professor Jeung to reflect on memory, migration, and the power of storytelling to reclaim erased histories across generations and coasts. The day concludes (3:40鈥�4:55 p.m.) with 鈥淪truggling, Surviving, Thriving鈥擜sian American Mental Health,鈥� a timely and deeply needed conversation on the socio-emotional and developmental challenges facing Asian American adolescents and college students, featuring leading scholars and clinicians including Clarissa S.L. Cheah and Cindy Liu.

Hess Week culminates on March 19 (11 a.m.鈥�12:15 p.m.) with the 2026 Robert L. Hess Memorial Lecture, delivered by Professor Jeung: 鈥淎sian American Movements for Racial Justice: Resistance and Solidarity.鈥� The lecture traces the long arc of Asian-American organizing鈥攆rom survival to coalition-building鈥攁nd invites the campus community to imagine new possibilities for justice in the present moment.

Across three days, Hess Week 2026 tells a collective story: of communities under pressure, of faith and culture as sources of belonging, of memory as resistance, of mental health as justice, and of movements that insist on dignity in the face of exclusion. We invite students, staff, faculty, and community members to join us for these conversations and be part of this shared work of learning, care, and solidarity.

All events are open to the public. Add the events to your calendar and join us for Hess Week 2026.

About Hess Week

Hess Week at 可乐视频 is an annual series of events hosted by the Ethyle R. Wolfe Institute for the Humanities that features a distinguished Scholar-in-Residence. The week includes public lectures, panels, and seminars, highlighted by the Robert L. Hess Memorial Lecture, focusing on critical social, political, or academic themes.

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Presenters include:

• Russell M. Jeung, the 2025-6 Robert L. Hess Scholar in Residence, is Professor of Asian American Studies at San Francisco State University and co-founder of Stop AAIP Hate. Over the last 25 years his research has shaped the fields of Asian American Studies and Sociology of Religion. He is author of Family Sacrifices: The Worldviews and Ethics of Chinese Americans; Moving Movers: Student Activism and the Emergence of Asian American Studies; At Home in Exile: Finding Jesus among My Ancestors and Refugee Neighbors; Sustaining Faith Traditions: Race, Ethnicity and Religion Among the Latino and Asian American Second Generation (with Carolyn Chen): and Faithful Generations: Race and New Asian American Churches. He co-produced the documentary, The Oak Park Story (2010), about a landmark housing lawsuit involving Cambodian and Latino tenants. In March 2020, Professor Jeung co-founded Stop AAPI Hate, a coalition that was awarded the 2021 Webby Award for “Social Movement of the Year.” He was named as one of the TIME 100 Most Influential Persons in 2021.

• Yung-Yi Diana Pan is the director of the American Studies Program and Associate Professor of Sociology at CUNY, 可乐视频. She is also faculty of Sociology at the Graduate Center. Pan鈥檚 research broadly intersects race, ethnicity, immigration, professions, and culture. Mostly, she is interested in examining how institutions not only maintain but reify racial norms and boundaries. Her first book, Incidental Racialization: Performative Assimilation in Law School (Temple University, 2017) examines how Asian American and Latinx law students are racialized as a part of their professional socialization. Her research has appeared in peer-reviewed sociology journals and interdisciplinary journals, including Sociological Forum, Journal for Asian American Studies, and International Journal of Clinical Legal Education, among others. She is co-PI on the 可乐视频 AANAPISI grant and has served in administrative positions at CUNY. Pan regularly teaches theory, research methods, and race and ethnicity courses, and advises students on an array of independent research topics.

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• Ava Chin is the author of Mott Street, winner of the CALA Best Book Award in Nonfiction and a PEN/Open Book Finalist, and Eating Wildly, winner of the M.F.K. Fisher Book Award for excellence in food writing. Mott Street, an ALA Notable Book and one of People magazine鈥檚 top books by Asian American authors, was a Best Book of the year by TIME, the SF Chronicle, Library Journal, Kirkus and Elle. Chin is the recipient of grants from the NYPL鈥檚 Cullman Center, Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program, NYFA, Asian American Writers鈥� Workshop and MacDowell. She is Professor of Creative Nonfiction at CUNY, head of the Grad Center鈥檚 American Studies Certificate Program, and a Visiting Scholar at Oxford University. The Huff Post named her one of “9 Contemporary Authors You Should Be Reading.”
• Russell M. Jeung, the 2025-6 Robert L. Hess Scholar in Residence, is Professor of Asian American Studies at San Francisco State University and co-founder of Stop AAIP Hate. Over the last 25 years his research has shaped the fields of Asian American Studies and Sociology of Religion. He is author of Family Sacrifices: The Worldviews and Ethics of Chinese Americans; Moving Movers: Student Activism and the Emergence of Asian American Studies; At Home in Exile: Finding Jesus among My Ancestors and Refugee Neighbors; Sustaining Faith Traditions: Race, Ethnicity and Religion Among the Latino and Asian American Second Generation (with Carolyn Chen): and Faithful Generations: Race and New Asian American Churches. He co-produced the documentary, The Oak Park Story (2010), about a landmark housing lawsuit involving Cambodian and Latino tenants. In March 2020, Professor Jeung co-founded Stop AAPI Hate, a coalition that was awarded the 2021 Webby Award for “Social Movement of the Year.” He was named as one of the TIME 100 Most Influential Persons in 2021.
• Alvin Khi锚m B霉i is Assistant Professor of History specializing in Asian and Asian diasporic histories. He received his doctoral degree from the University of Washington, Seattle in modern Southeast Asian and East Asian history. His research is on ethnic Chinese in and from southern Vietnam. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa and magna cum laude from the University of California, Los Angeles, in History and Asian American Studies, after which he lived and worked in Vietnam in education and venture capital. He has published on Saigonese motorbike YouTubers and their diasporic Vietnamese audiences.

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Presenters include:

• Anju Gupta, Professor of Law and Judge Chester J. Straub Scholar; Director, Immigrant Rights Clinic, Rutgers Law School, Newark
• Russell M. Jeung, Professor of Asian American Studies at San Francisco State University, co-founder of Stop AAPI Hate; and Rober L. Hess Scholar-in-Residence 2026
• Rev. Deborah Lee, Co-Executive Director of Interfaith Movement for Human Integrity
• Socheatta Meng, Executive Director, Mekong NYC

Moderator:

• Gunja SenGupta, Professor of History, 可乐视频 and the Graduate
  Center, CUNY

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Presenters include:

• Carolyn Chen, Professor of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley; Co-Director of the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion Executive Director of the Asian Pacific American Religions Research Initiative
• Jerry Park, Associate Professor of Sociology at Baylor University; President of the Association for the Sociology of Religion
• Dr. David Kim, scholar, public intellectual, educator, and Founder and Principal of Being Human
• Russell M. Jeung, Professor of Asian American Studies at San Francisco State University; co-founder of Stop AAPI Hate; and Robert L. Hess Scholar-in-Residence 2026

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The book addresses our misguided assumptions about success, which have led us to relentlessly pursue external goods and achievements at the expense of our own happiness. Vitrano defends the view that the key to living successfully is to find happiness, arguing that everything else we typically associate with success is important only insofar as it contributes to happiness. She proposes that just as it is a mistake to associate success with external goods like wealth and material possessions, it is also a mistake to place restrictions on how one finds happiness in life.

Christine Vitrano is professor and chair of the Department of Philosophy at 可乐视频, CUNY. She is author of numerous articles and books, including The Nature and Value of Happiness, and Happiness and Goodness: Philosophical Reflections on Living Well, which was co-written with Steven M. Cahn. Her latest book, The Pursuit of Success: Philosophical Reflections on Happiness, Well-being and Meaning in Life, examines what it means to live a successful life.

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About the Book

What to Carry Into the Future emerged from riding every NYC subway from end to end. Set within the city鈥檚 subways, streets, and waterways, the collection charts the continuous aftermath of catastrophe alongside the city鈥檚 many pleasures.听 The collection uses transportation and location as a metaphor and a conduit to explore beleaguered social relationships and standards that are challenged by political and natural forces. When we look for a city鈥檚 infrastructure, where do we find it, what do we see, and what does it tell us about how we鈥檙e living?

About the Speakers

Sue Landers is the author of four poetry collections. Her latest, What to Carry Into the Future, emerged from riding every NYC subway from end to end. Her poems have appeared in Poem-A-Day, The Brooklyn Rail, and elsewhere. She was the former executive director of Lambda Literary and currently serves as Director of Content Strategy at 可乐视频.

Celina Su is the Marilyn J. Gittell Chair in Urban Studies and a Professor of Political Science at CUNY. Her latest book is Budget Justice: On Building Grassroots Politics and Solidarities, from Princeton University Press. Her other publications include Streetwise for Book Smarts: Grassroots Organizing and Education Reform in the Bronx (Cornell University Press) and pieces in the New York Times Magazine, Harper鈥檚, n+1, and elsewhere.

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September 29, 6:30鈥�7:30 p.m.

Free Speech Handbook: A Practical Framework for Understanding Our Free Speech Protections
Join this online conversation with author Ian Rosenberg and illustrator Mike Cavallaro, moderated by Associate Professor Beth Evans, 可乐视频 Library. In the face of a rising tide of censorship and suppression, this updated paperback edition of Free Speech Handbook, the acclaimed nonfiction graphic novel, equips readers with a practical framework for appreciating the history鈥昦nd future鈥昽f our free speech protections.

October 7, 12:30鈥�2 p.m.

Labor Evangelicals: Faith, Authority, and Resistance at Work
Join us for a conversation with Associate Professor of Political Science Ken Estey, author of Labor Evangelicals, and Professor of Sociology Timothy Shortell. Estey鈥檚 recent book studies theologically conservative working-class evangelicals in the United States who resist the common preconception that they eagerly embrace deregulation, unfettered markets, and globalized capital.

October 9, 6鈥�7:15 p.m.

Art as Cognition: How Gist Reframes the Aesthetic Experience as Conversation
Join Associate Professor of Philosophy Dena Shottenkirk and Assistant Professor Nicholas Whittaker (Wesleyan University) as they discuss Shottenkirk鈥檚 Art as Cognition. The book argues that a satisfactory account of the aesthetic experience would be derived from the perceptual experiences of both artist and viewer.

October 16, 6鈥�7:15 p.m.

Embodied Epistemology as Rigorous Historical Method
Join medieval historian Lauren Mancia and Professor of Anthropology Katie Rose Hejtmanek as they discuss Mancia鈥檚 new short book, Embodied Epistemology as Rigorous Historical Method. Learn why scholars assume they cannot use reperformance in academic inquiry and why they, in fact, should.

October 20, 6鈥�7:15 p.m.

Budget Justice: On Building Grassroots Politics and Solidarities
Join Gabe Dunn, bestselling author, actor, and filmmaker, and host of the podcast 鈥淏ad With Money,鈥� and Professor Celina Su, Department of Political Science, for a conversation on racial capitalism, coalition building, and her recent book, Budget Justice. Drawing on her years of engagement with democratic governance in New York City and around the globe, Su proposes in her book a new kind of democracy, in which city residents make collective decisions about public needs through processes like participatory budgeting, and in which they work across racial divides and segregated spaces as neighbors rather than as consumers or members of voting blocs.

October 23, 6鈥�7:15 p.m.

The Fruitfulness of Normative Concepts
Join Associate Professor of Philosophy Professor Matthew Lindauer for a conversation on his important recent book, The Fruitfulness of Normative Concepts. Can philosophical concepts do real work in improving our world? Should we, when evaluating competing understandings of concepts like 鈥渏ustice鈥� and 鈥渟olidarity,鈥� take into account whether these different understandings can help us to fight injustice and promote solidarity between people?

November 20, 3:40鈥�5 p.m.

Words With Wings and Magic Things
Join author and Associate Professor of English Matthew Burgess and illustrator Doug Salati as they discuss their collaboration in their recent book, Words With Wings and Magic Things. Beyond the doorway of the first page of this collection awaits a dragon pi帽ata, an alligator on the A train, a hungry yeti, an ice cream dream, jetpack sneakers, midnight firelight, a gray day, a plump tomato, a serious question, and so much more.

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President Anderson will be joined by Associate Professor of History Phil Napoli, Dean, School of the Humanities and Social Sciences; Douglas NeJaime, Anne Urowsky Professor of Law, Yale Law School; Karen M. Tani, Seaman Family University Professor, Law School and Department of History, University of Pennsylvania; and others. President Anderson and Murray will discuss the significance of听Murray鈥檚 work as a legal scholar, public intellectual, and advocate.

听On Thursday, April 3, at 11 a.m.,听Murray will deliver the 2025 Robert L.听Hess听Memorial Lecture, 鈥淔unhouse Footnote Four:听How the Roberts Court Is Remaking the Constitutional Order.鈥�

Inspired by Murray鈥檚 work, the rest of Hess Week will focus on the role of the courts in our democracy; the use of history by the courts; podcasting as part of our public discourse; issues of听reproductive justice, immigrant rights, LGBTQ rights, and civil rights and liberties; and imagining our collective future. Among the 26 speakers who will join in conversation with the 可乐视频 community are Deborah Archer (President, ACLU), Alexis McGill Johnson (President and CEO, Planned Parenthood President), Lee Gerlent (Director, ACLU鈥檚 Immigrant Rights Project), Chase Strangio (听Co-Director of the ACLU鈥檚 LGBT & HIV Project, first trans person to argue in front of the Supreme Court), Maria Hinojosa (Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist), and听Barbara Smith听(2023 Hess Scholar-in-Residence).

The public events listed below are hosted by 可乐视频鈥檚 Ethyle R. Wolfe Institute for the Humanities in honor of Professor Murray. All events will be held in the Woody Tanger Auditorium, 150 可乐视频 Library, unless otherwise noted.

听TUESDAY, APRIL 1

Welcome Ceremony
11 a.m.鈥搉oon

Abortion and Democracy

2:15鈥�3:30 p.m.

听WEDNESDAY APRIL 2

听History and the Courts
11 a.m.鈥�12:15 p.m.

Dobbs and the Future of Individual Rights
12:30鈥�2 p.m.

The Role of the Courts in our Democracy
3:40鈥�5 p.m.

THURSDAY, APRIL 3

听Funhouse Footnote Four: How the Roberts Court Is Remaking the Constitutional Order
The 2025 Robert L.听Hess听Memorial Lecture
11 a.m.鈥�12:15 p.m.

Podcasting in the Changing Media/Political Landscape
2:15鈥�3:30 p.m.
Jefferson-Williams Lounge, 400 Student Center

听About the Hess Scholar-in-Residence Program

听The Robert L. Hess Scholar-in-Residence Program, established by 可乐视频, is supported by the Robert L. Hess Fund. The program serves as a permanent tribute to the scholarly commitment of Robert L. Hess, exemplified during his tenure as president of 可乐视频. It represents the ideal of the educated individual鈥攌nowledgeable, thoughtful, inquiring, and alive to the shared purposes and concerns lining all intellectual pursuits. More particularly, it evokes the academic virtues embodied in the curriculum at 可乐视频.

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Abortion Beyond the Law

Wednesday, March 6, 1鈥�2 p.m. (Hybrid event)

可乐视频 Women鈥檚 Center, 227 Ingersoll Hall Extension

Celebrate the recent publication of听Abortion Beyond the Law听by Professor of Sociology Naomi Braine听and learn about the transnational feminist movement for self-managed medication abortion. The book came out of six years of research, including interviews with 70 activists across four continents, to explore the strategies feminists have developed to enable people facing unwanted pregnancies to safely have an abortion regardless of the law. Braine will discuss her research and the book, and panelists Sybil Nkeiruka Nmezi, founder of Generation Initiative for Women and Youth Network in Nigeria, and Caitlin Gerdts, Vice President for Research at Ibis Reproductive Health, will bring the conversation forward to discuss their work today.

The Future of New York City: Who Decides?

Monday, March 18, 6 p.m.

Celebrate Anthropology Professor Naomi Schiller鈥檚 recent co-authored book at an event that will explore what role people can play in shaping the future of their neighborhood and the broader city. Speakers will explore how community organizers attempt to navigate New York City鈥檚 complex official decision-making processes to fight for housing and build healthy and sustainable communities. We鈥檒l address how community organizers have responded to Mayor Eric Adams鈥� vision for a 鈥淐ity of Yes鈥� and what possibilities Community Land Trusts offer for people to steward land on behalf of local communities. Panelists will build on the lessons advanced in their collectively produced handbook,听.

听Affective Masculinities: From Colonial Fathers to Bachelor Banisters in India and England (19th and 20^th Centuries)

Thursday, April 18, 4:15鈥�5:55 p.m.

Woody Tanger Auditorium, 可乐视频 Library

Celebrate History Professor Swapna M. Banerjee鈥檚 latest book,听Fathers in the Motherland: Imagining Fatherhood in Colonial India听(Oxford University Press, 2022). Banerjee will be joined by NYU History Professor Ren Pepitone. The book contends that during a period of social and political change in late 19th and early 20th-century colonial India, , fathers extended their roles beyond breadwinning to take an active part in rearing their children. Exploring specific moments when educated men鈥攁s biological fathers, literary activists, and educators鈥攁ssumed guardianship and became crucial agents of change, Banerjee interrogates the connections between fatherhood and masculinity. The last chapter of the book draws on the lives of Mohandas K. Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru to provide a broader salience to its argument. Reclaiming two missing links in Indian history, the book argues that biological and imaginary “fathers” assumed the moral guardianship of an incipient nation and rested their hopes and dreams on the future generation.

听Advocacy and Archaeology: Present Thoughts

Wednesday, May 8, 6 p.m.

Celebrate Assistant Professor of Anthropology Kelly Britt鈥檚 recently published co-edited volume,听Advocacy and Archaeology: Urban Intersections. The book is based on the theme of activism in urban settings,听drawing on the endeavors of those working in these settings and their advocacy efforts听on a variety of social justice and historic preservation projects. This event will bring the conversations highlighted in this volume into the present moment as archaeologists face ongoing and increasing challenges.

Further information on the books in the series is available here.

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