Prof. Jack Tchen

Headshot of Jack Tchen
Jack (John Kuo Wei) Tchen is a historian, curator, dumpster-diver, and teacher surfacing the disappeared stories othered by systems of power and wealth. Dr. Tchen is the Clement A. Price Professor of Public History & Humanities and Director of the Price Institute on Ethnicity, Cultures, and the Modern Experience Rutgers-Newark. He is the founding director of the A/P/A (Asian/Pacific/American) Studies Program and Institute at New York University, NYU. He co-founded the Museum of Chinese in America. His ten-years of work on anti-Asian xenophobia, a two-hour PBS documentary on the “Chinese Exclusion Act,” and exhibition at the New-York Historical Society led him to focus on intersectional history of American eugenics. Via a series of exhibits, conferences, and performances, he has been retelling NYC-US history from the lens of “Nordic” eugenics hierarchies of “fit” elite, white Protestants versus the world’s “unfit” others.