Bowdoin College Assistant Professor of History and Environmental Studies Connie Chiang will speak on “Nature Behind Barbed Wire: Environment and the Japanese-American Incarceration” as part of Western Washington University’s Huxley College of the Environment speaker series at 3 p.m., Friday, May 28 at WWU’s Communications Facility room 125.
The event is free and open to the public.
In the wake of Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, the United States government moved more than 110,000 Japanese Americans from the Pacific Coast to 10 relocation centers in the inland West and Arkansas. Chiang’s lecture explores how the environment – typically arid and semi-arid landscapes – shaped Japanese Americans' everyday lives and resistance and the federal government's efforts to confine and assimilate them.
Chiang received her doctorate in History from the University of Washington. She is the author of “Shaping the Shoreline: Fisheries and Tourism on the Monterey Coast” and is currently working on a book manuscript on the environmental history of the Japanese-American incarceration during World War II.
For more information contact David Rossiter, WWU assistant professor of Environmental Studies at (360) 650-3603 or david.rossiter@wwu.edu.
