Dr. Jack Tchen
Jack (John Kuo Wei) Tchen is a historian, curator, dumpster-diver, and teacher surfacing the disappeared stories othered by systems of power and wealth. Dr. Tchen is the Clement A. Price Professor of Public History & Humanities and Director of the Price Institute on Ethnicity, Cultures, and the Modern Experience Rutgers-Newark. He is the founding director of the A/P/A (Asian/Pacific/American) Studies Program and Institute at New York University, NYU. He co-founded the Museum of Chinese in America. His ten-years of work on anti-Asian xenophobia, a two-hour PBS documentary on the “Chinese Exclusion Act,” and exhibition at the New-York Historical Society led him to focus on intersectional history of American eugenics. Via a series of exhibits, conferences, and performances, he has been retelling NYC-US history from the largely disappeared and unperceived frames of the “rights of nature,” settler extractive colonialisms, and “Nordic” eugenics hierarchies of “fit” elite, white Protestants versus the world’s “unfit” others. He has served on the NYC Panel on Climate Change (NPCC) and is building teams of faculty, staff, and graduate/undergrad students to be collaborating with communities and community organization is grappling with the immediate impacts of climate change on water, soil, and food. Their work builds on a National Science Foundation grant to increase low income and BIPOC research collaboration in the Passaic Watershed Basin, with upstream and downstream communities. He has been working with the Munsee Lunaape Elders since 2016 and honoring enslaved in the region by documenting, sharing, and decolonizing the history of Newark and the larger region, while also questioning the Dutch claim to have “purchased” Manhattan in 1626.