About the Speakers
Sarah Park Dahlen 박사라 is an Associate Professor at the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where she is also affiliate faculty in the Department of Asian American Studies and the Center for East Asian & Pacific Studies. Her research is on Asian American youth literature and transracial Korean adoption. She co-edits Research on Diversity in Youth Literature and co-edited Harry Potter and the Other: Race, Justice, and Difference in the Wizarding World. Her next book with Paul Lai addresses Asian American youth literature. She is a board member of the International Research Society for Children’s Literature.
Michelle Lê is a current PhD candidate in the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Her research is on Vietnamese American History, Vietnamese American youth literature, Asian American youth literature, Viet Nam War and Memory, and Oral History Archives.
About the Talk
Literature depicting the Vietnamese diaspora for all ages has exploded in the last decade, and it is imperative that we study how these books represent Vietnamese culture and history. In this talk, we examine how Vietnamese American picture books depict water and war. We seek to understand motifs such as water (a defining aspect of Vietnamese life and culture), land (which often means water for the Vietnamese), and language (which changes across time and place). These books tell an emerging story of the changing map of Vietnamese across the world, past, present, and future, and guide us in creating harmony with the earth, and with one another.