Americanist Dinner Forum: The AMCS Colloquium Series

The Americanist Dinner Forum is a flagship intellectual event for the AMCS community. Each semester AMCS features a new speaker or speakers, exploring a topic relevant to American Culture Studies through different mediums, including formal lectures, roundtables and panels, and informal workshops with a selected reading or other materials.

Announcements

AMCS & AAS Fall 2026 Courses

Check out our Fall 2026 Courses!

7.16.26

AMCS Welcomes Rebecca Wanzo, new Director of American Culture Studies!

6.25.26

Americanist Dinner Forum Guest Speakers

Kong Pha - Resized

Dr. Kong Pheng Pha

Kong Pha - Resized — Sexuality, Belonging and Race Among Asian Americans in the Midwest

Do Asian Americans belong to the Midwest? What are their unique experiences and politics of life here?
Specifically, what are the unique experiences of Hmong Americans in the state of Minnesota? This forum will celebrate Dr. Kong Pheng Pha’s 2025 book Queering the Hmong Diaspora: Racial Subjectivity and the Myth of Hyperheterosexuality to highlight how Hmong American activism has been key to restructuring racial, gender, and sexual formations in the Midwest. Engaging questions of race, citizenship, belonging, and resistance, the discussion also positions Minnesota as a key regional, national, and global site of political struggle shaped by Hmong American movements for justice.

Dr. Kong Pheng Pha will be in conversation with Dr. Rene Esparza from Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies at WashU and the author of another 2025 sensational book situated in the Midwest, From Vice to Nice: Race, Sex and the Gentrification of AIDS.

Kong Pheng Pha is assistant professor of gender and women’s studies and Asian American studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His research, public scholarship, and creative activity focus on Hmong history and politics; war and U.S. empire; critical refugee studies; Asian American communities in the Midwest; Asian American education; and LGBTQ social movements in the U.S. His book Queering the Hmong Diaspora: Racial Subjectivity and the Myth of Hyperheterosexuality (University of Washington Press, 2025) analyzes Hmong racial subject formation and cultural transformations against the backdrop of U.S. sexual and queer liberalism. His research has been published in the Hmong Studies Journal, Minnesota History, Amerasia Journal, Journal of Asian American Studies, American Quarterly, American Studies, Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, AGITATE!, Race Ethnicity and Education, Journal of Transnational American Studies, and Equity and Excellence in Education. His public scholarship has been published in Aperture Magazine, Leader-Telegram, Reappropriate, Twin Cities Daily Planet, and Hmong Today. His current projects include a book of personal narrative nonfiction essays about Hmong’s place in a revolutionary America, and a book on the visuality of invisibility, secrecy, and statelessness.

Jarvis Givens

Distinguished Visiting Scholar Dr. Jarvis Givens

Dr. Tashima Thomas

Dr. Tashima Thomas

Brooke Eastman

Brooke Eastman

Brooke Eastman — Brooke Eastman

"Document Du Jour" Dinner Forum is an opportunity for an AMCS graduate student to present an intriguing or puzzling document or artifact from their dissertation research - one that will be of wide interest to Americanists across disciplinary lines - and to puzzle through it with colleagues.

The Fall 2025 presenter is Brooke Eastman.
On July 20, 1969, Apollo 11's lunar landing captured the attention and imagination of people around the world, and it was of particular fascination to artists working in the emergent field of Land Art. Artist Nancy Holt wrote about the parcel of land in Utah she purchased to construct her seminal work Sun Tunnels (1973-76), "So when I would walk on [my land], it was like being the first person on the planet to walk on this particular piece of earth at this moment. That sensation stirred up thoughts of astronauts walking on the moon for the first time."

This Doc du Jour event will focus on a recently discovered object made by Holt in 1972 in the wake of the Space Race. This book-object consists of thirteen pages of collaged text excerpts, prints, photographs, and even a consumer product label, all related to the Moon. The extraterrestrial imaginary of science fiction, from H.G. Wells and Frank Herbert, presses against the realities of space exploration in the twentieth century. This book-object opens up broader discussions about the Moon as a real location, made more accessible through technological advances; a locus of competing imperialist and nationalist projects; and a site of cultural imagination, ripe for the mining of symbolism and commodification.

Brooke Eastman is a PhD student in the department of Art History & Archaeology, focusing on Land Art in the United States from the late 1960s through 1980s. Her dissertation examines Land Art's relationship to the legal and cultural conceptions of property in the U.S. and works to restore Indigenous land histories and epistemologies to the sites of these earthworks. She holds a Lynne Cooper Harvey Fellowship in American Culture Studies and a Dean's Distinguished Graduate Fellowship.

GB Tran

GB Tran

Vanessa Angelica Viillareal

Vanessa Angélica Villarreal

Sara Flores

Lyndon Barrois Jr.

Lyndon Barrois, Jr.

Dr. Kathryn Walkiewicz