Speakers

Keynote Speaker

Title: “Patriarchy is only Part of the Problem”

Fawzia Afzal-Khan was Director of the Women and Gender Studies Program from 2009-15, Professor of English at Montclair State University, and recipient of the University Distinguished Scholar Award 2009/10. She is author of two books of scholarly criticism, Cultural Imperialism: Genre and Ideology in the Indo-English Novel (Penn State Press 1993), and A Critical Stage: The Role of Secular Alternative Theatre in Pakistan (Seagull Press, 2005). She is co-editor of The PreOccupation of Postcolonial Studies (Duke University Press, 2000), and Editor of the best-selling anthology, Shattering the Stereotypes: Muslim Women Speak Out (Interlink Books 2005). Her memoir: Lahore with Love: Growing Up With Girlfriends Pakistani Style was published by Syracuse University Press in 2010.

Afzal-Khan is a trained vocalist in North Indian Classical music, a published playwright and poet, and has worked as an actor and performer for Ajoka Theatre Troupe of Pakistan, as well as with the experimental theatre collective Compagnie Faim de Siecle of which she was one of the founding members. Her one-woman show Scheherezade Goes West and plays Sext of Saudade (co-written with Annie Lanzillotto) and Jihad Against Violence (co-written with Bina Sharif) have been published in The Drama review, and performed internationally.

She serves as Contributing Editor on The Drama Review, and is Founding Chair of the South Asian Feminist Caucus of The National Women’s Studies Association of North America, where she also served as a member of the Governing Council. She was recently named on the Editorial Advisory Board of a new peer-reviewed e-journal published by CUNY called Arab Stages. She was awarded 2 Fulbright-Hays Fellowships to Pakistan during AY 2015-16 and has just completed her final Fulbright Specialist appointment at Forman Christian College (FCCU) in Lahore in March, 2020.

She is Creative Director and Producer on an award-winning short documentary film about Pakistani Female Singers entitled Siren Song: Women Singers of Pakistan, for which she won a development grant from the National Endowment o the Humanities in 2011. Her most recent book is Siren Song: Understanding Pakistan Through its Women Singers (OUP: 2020), which was launched in February 2020 at the Karachi Literary Festival.

Pyong Gap Min is a sociologist, currently a Distinguished Professor of Sociology at City University of New York, Director of the Research Center for Korean Community at Queens College and also a published author. Dr. Min’s areas of interest include immigration, ethnic identity, ethnic business, immigrants’ religious practices, and family/gender, with a special focus on Asian/Korean Americans. He is the author of six books, five of them focusing on Korean immigrants’ experiences. They include Caught in the Middle: Korean Communities in New York and Los Angeles (1996), the winner of two national book awards, and Preserving Ethnicity through Religion in America: Korean Protestants and Indian Hindus across Generations (2010), the winner of three national book awards, one in Korea and the other two in the United States. His last book is Korean Comfort Women: Military Brothel, Brutality, and the Redress Movement published just this year.

Dr. Min’s fourteen edited and co-edited books include Encyclopedia of Racism in the United States, 3 volumes (2005) and Asian Americans: Contemporary Trends and Issues, the Second Edition (2006). He was a Russell Sage Foundation fellow in 2006-2007, for writing his 2008 book, Ethnic Solidarity for Economic Survival: Korean Greengrocers in New York City. He received the Distinguished Career Award from the International Migration Section of the American Sociological Association in 2012 and the Contribution to the Field Award from the Section on Asia and Asian America of the American Sociological Association in 2019.