Jin Y. Park
Chair of Philosophy and Religion at American University, Washington DC
“Translating Violence”
Jin Y. Park is Professor and Department Chair of Philosophy and Religion at American University. She also served as Founding Director of Asian Studies Program from 2013-2020. Park specializes in East Asian Buddhism, Buddhist and comparative ethics, intercultural philosophy, and modern East Asian philosophy. Her research focuses on gender, violence, politics of discrimination, and narrative philosophy. Marginality has been a consistent theme in her scholarship which deals with the marginalization of non-West and non-Western philosophy, of women’s philosophy, and of some forms of philosophizing, revealing the power structure in philosophy and aiming for the voices of the margin to be heard.
Park currently serves as President of the American Academy of Religion and also President of the North American Korean Philosophy Association. She also served as President of the Society for Asian and Comparative Philosophy (2018-2019).
Ato Quayson
Jean G. and Morris M. Doyle Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at Stanford University, CA
“The Ethnography of the Private Sphere: Trauma, Domesticity, and Healing in the Work of Toni Morrison.”
Ato Quayson is the Jean G. and Morris M. Doyle Professor in Interdisciplinary Studies and Professor of English at Stanford.
He studied for his undergraduate degree at the University of Ghana and took his Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge, after which he held a Junior Research Fellowship at Wolfson College, Oxford before returning to Cambridge to become Reader in Commonwealth and Postcolonial Literature in the Faculty of English from 1995-2005. He was also Director of the Centre for African Studies (1998-2005) and a Fellow of Pembroke College while at Cambridge (1995-2005). Prior to Stanford he was Professor of African and Postcolonial Literature at New York University (2017-2019) and Professor of English and inaugural Director of the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies at the University of Toronto (2005-2017). In 2016 he was appointed University Professor at the University of Toronto, the highest distinction that the university can bestow.
Professor Quayson has published 6 monographs and 8 edited volumes.
