In recognition of the 82nd anniversary of Japanese American incarceration during WWII, join Nevada Humanities and the Japanese American Citizens League for music, a short documentary, and an evening of conversation about remembrance and the power of stories in the Japanese American community. The evening will begin with a performance by Reno Taiko Tsurunokai, followed by a screening of Remembering Manzanar: A Documentary (21 min.), and conclude with a conversation with Dr. Meredith Oda, Associate Professor of History at the University of Nevada, Reno and Dr. Claire Stanford, Assistant Professor of English at the University of Nevada, Reno.

Image/"Japanese Americans waiting in mess hall line" (ddr-densho-151-369), Densho, Dorothea Lange Collection.

Meredith Oda is Associate Professor of History at the University of Nevada, Reno. Her research and teaching focuses on Asian American history, urban history, US-East Asian relations, the U.S. in the world, and the 20 th century US. A graduate from UC Berkeley and the University of Chicago, her first book, The Gateway to the Pacific: Japanese Americans and the Remaking of San Francisco (Chicago, 2018), was a transpacific urban history of San Francisco. In addition to articles in scholarly journals, her writing has also been published in Nevada Humanities blogs, the San Francisco Chronicle, TIME magazine, and other popular outlets. She has received grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Huntington Library, the Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Chicago, and the University of Nevada, Reno. She’s currently at work on a book about mobility and alienage in Japanese American WWII incarceration and resettlement.

Claire Stanford is the author of the novel Happy for You (Viking, 2022), which was named a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice. Her fiction and essays have appeared in Black Warrior Review, The Rumpus, Tin House Flash Fridays, Electric Lit, Lit Hub, The Millions, Los Angeles Review of Books, and The American Scholar, among other publications; her scholarship has appeared in Modern Fiction Studies and is forthcoming in the Routledge Handbook of CoFuturisms. She holds an MFA from the University of Minnesota and a PhD in English from the University of California, Los Angeles.