Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere

Ivy Chen has over twenty years of experience working in non-profit cultural organizations. She created and administered the Harn Museum Composer-in-Residence program, which commissioned graduate composition students from the UF School of Music to create music inspired by objects in the Asian collection to be premiered in the galleries followed by conversations with the artists and audience. She holds a BA in Asian Studies from Williams College, an Artist Diploma in Cello Performance from The Boston Conservatory, and is currently pursuing a MA in museum studies at the University of Florida, focusing on equity, inclusion, access, and social justice.

Tao Leigh Goffe is an award-winning writer and DJ specializing in the origin stories that emerge from histories of race, empire, climate, and technology. Her story was featured as an experimental short film on Hulu’s Initiative 29 that celebrates Black history, heroes, and futurism. Writing recipes, curating exhibitions, and producing mixed media art, she explores the full range of the human sensorium in her artistic practice.She was born in London, United Kingdom and lives and works in Manhattan.  She studied English at Princeton University before earning her PhD from Yale University. Dr. Goffe is an assistant professor of literary theory and cultural history at Cornell University.  Her research is rooted in literature and theories of labor that center Black feminism’s engagements with Indigeneity and Asian diasporic racial formations.

Dr. Goffe is the founding director of the Dark Laboratory, a collective on race and ecology where members develop stories using creative technology (VR, AR, XR, DJ’ing, film, screenwriting).  Dr. Goffe is also the Executive Director of the Afro-Asia Group, an advisory organization with the mission of creating spaces of collaboration between African and Asian diasporas on futurity, solidarity, and infrastructure.

Dr. Goffe has held academic positions at Leiden University in the Netherlands and Princeton University. She has been interviewed and quoted in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and by Vice Munchies. Her writing has been published in Artsy, South Atlantic Quarterly, Small Axe, Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, and Boston Review. For her literary representation, please contact Janklow and Nesbit.

Miki Kaneda researches transcultural movements and the entanglements of race, gender, and empire in experimental, avant-garde and popular music in the 20th and 21st centuries. She has published on topics including the transnational flows of experimental sonic arts, art and the everyday, and video game sound. Her book project titled Transpacific Experiments: Intermedia Art and Ambivalent Listening in 1960s Japan is under contract with the University of Michigan Press. She is currently Assistant Professor of Music at Boston University. Previously, she held fellowship positions at the Weatherhead East Asian Institute at Columbia University, Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies at Harvard University, and the Museum of Modern Art, where she was a founding co-editor of the web platform, post.moma.org.

Christine R. Yano is a professor of Anthropology at the University of Hawai`i, has conducted research on Japan and Japanese Americans with a focus on popular culture. In 2020-2021 she served as the President of the Association for Asian Studies. She has served as Chair of the American Advisory Committee to Japan Foundation from 2018 to 2022. In 2022 she begins her tenure as President-Elect of the Society for East Asian Anthropology, American Anthropological Association. Her publications include Tears of Longing: Nostalgia and the Nation in Japanese Popular Song (Harvard, 2002), Airborne Dreams: “Nisei” Stewardesses and Pan American World Airways (Duke, 2011), and Pink Globalization: Hello Kitty and its Trek Across the Pacific (Duke, 2013). Her latest book is Straight A’s: Asian American College Students in Their Own Words with Neal Akatsuka (Duke, 2018).