An open house was held Tuesday and Wednesday for students to meet Professor Evelyn Hu-DeHart, a scholar who will be visiting Wesleyan for the 2005-2006 academic year. The informal meetings were held at the Center for the Americas and the Freeman Center for East Asian Studies.

“I want to serve as a resource,” said Hu-DeHart. “My office hours are open. I’m open to meet with students, to help [them] pursue their projects, [and to serve] as a lecturer. This is my work. This is why I’m here.”

Hu-DeHart was chosen to visit Wesleyan as part of the final year of the Freeman Asian/Asian American Initiative. The initiative is a four-year effort funded by a $1.9 million dollar grant from the Freeman Foundation to support the study of Asia and the Asian Diaspora, people of Asian heritage outside the geographic borders of Asia. The grant has sponsored several visiting professors in addition to lectures, performances, and workshops including the New York Trio jazz performance, a visiting tai-chi master, and the Asian film festival.“The grant will also enrich and further contextualize the study of Asian languages and literatures and give undergraduate students funding for directed study abroad,” said Stanford M. Forrester, Coordinator of the Initiative. “In addition, [it can] provide an excellent opportunity to create a bridge between the Center for East Asian Studies and the Center for the Americas.”

Hu-DeHart is visiting from Brown University, where she was named Director of the Center for Race and Ethnicity in 2002. After completing undergraduate studies at Stanford University, Hu-DeHart earned her Ph.D. in history at the University of Texas–Austin in 1976, specializing in the history of Latin America. She began her teaching career with part-time appointments at El Colegio de Mexico in Mexico City and the University of Michigan–Ann Arbor. Since then she has given her time to several universities around the country including a thirteen-year position at the University of Colorado–Boulder, where she directed the Center for Studies of Ethnicity and Race in America.“[I think] I’m driven to study people who were expelled or displaced from their homeland,” Hu-DeHart said. “My parents were refugees, displaced twice growing up in China.”

At the meetings, Hu-DeHart spoke with students on how race and ethnicity studies are viewed in the United States and how that influenced her, in part, to expand her studies to encompass cultures from around the globe.

“I think all these dominant white professors are studying European history or the [history of] white Europe, but it’s such a double standard on whether or not we can be objective,” she said. “[They say] ‘you’re just studying yourself,’ so I decided to show them and go study in Latin America. I actually found a lot of Asians living there, and that’s part of how I got interested in studying this, the Asian Diaspora.”

Hu-DeHart stressed the importance of self-knowledge and the benefits of studying one’s own cultural history.

“Of course everyone can do it, but having that insider perspective adds another dimension,” she said. “Now we see the majority of white males studying European history. They have insider knowledge; they just don’t call it that.”

A wide-ranging scholar, Hu-DeHart has published studies on the Yaqui Indians of Mexico and Arizona, Chinese immigration to the United States, Caribbean and Latin America, women and minorities in higher education, and the politics of multiculturalism. She speaks several languages including English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, German, and her native Chinese, both Mandarin and Cantonese, and has published works in English, Spanish, Mayan and Chinese.

“I’ve published in Europe, Latin America, [and] Asia,” Hu-DeHart said. “Every time I publish in a different place in a different language, I’m engaging a different audience. You want people to read and critique your work, offer criticism; that’s what scholarship is about.”

Hu-DeHart’s recent research has focused on the Chinese Diaspora in Latin America and the Caribbean. She will be teaching a seminar in the spring called “Diaspora and Transnationalism,” focusing on the inter-related themes of diaspora and Transnationalism in the Asian Pacific.

“Sooner or later, you’ll discover that the things you’re interested in studying are related to who you are,” she said. “It’s important not only to open ourselves up to the world, but to open up the world to ourselves.”