The Clement A. Price Institute on Ethnicity, Culture, and the Modern Experience at Rutgers University, Newark has named its new chair. New York University professor John Kuo Wei (Jack) Tchen, who specializes in American and Asian American History, has been selected as the center’s inaugural chair, a position left vacant when founder Clement A. Price passed away in 2014. University of Pennsylvania Professor of English and Africana Studies Salamishah Tillet will join as the associate director. Both Tchen and Tillet are renowned scholars in the field of public history. Tchen founded the Asian/Pacific/American Studies Program and Institute at NYU and co-founded the Museum of Chinese in America. Tillet is a faculty member of the Alice Paul Center for Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at UPenn and a co-founder of A Long Walk Home, a non-profit organization that uses art to educate on the topic of violence against women.
The center was founded by Price in 1997 as the Institute on Ethnicity, Culture and Modern Experience. It was posthumously renamed in Price’s honor. It aims to support the use of art and engagement in the continued revitalization of the city of Newark, New Jersey. For more information about the Price Institute and its new faculty, see Rutgers-Newark’s press release.
