What do you Love about your major?

I love the tight-knit community in the Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures Department and the mentorship I’ve received from my peers and faculty. There are so many opportunities in MELC for support and networking, as well as fellow passionate language students with a range of interests and areas of research!

Professor Shawn Wong was featured in Sound Bite, a podcast network from The Daily of the UW.  You can listen to the "How Do I Get Your Job" segment featuring Professor Wong from autumn quarter 2020 here: Screenwriting with Shawn Wong (Americanese) 

You’re writing a book about television and philosophy. Where do they intersect? 

The short answer is: “no television, no postmodern theory.” Television’s ability to instantaneously transmit images and sounds from distant places changed how we thought of reality and led to the rise of such concepts like simulation. Rather than rehearse debates about mass media and its influence, the book explores television as something that has ontological and epistemological implications that haven’t really been grappled with in the field.

Pimone Triplett and Charles LaPorte discuss how the poetic form from Terrance Hayes' "The Golden Shovel" grew out of deeper history of race and gender in America to help us better contextualize the famous Gwendolyn Brooks poem, "We Real Cool."

Professor Diana Flores Ruíz comes to us from the University of California at Berkeley, where she earned her PhD in film and media studies.  Her current book project explores the visual technologies (from cartography to biometrics) that have been used to draw and redraw the US-Mexican border, how they work to maintain settler colonial power relations, and how Latinx artists and activities have enacted visual forms of resistance.