Terry K Park, PhD (he/him)
Founding Director
Short Bio:
Dr. Terry K Park (he/him) is an award-winning educator, social justice advocate, and former performance artist. Currently, Dr. Park is the founding director of Maum Consulting, an Asian American Studies-based educational social enterprise. He previously served as a full-time, teaching-focused professor of Asian American Studies at seven higher education institutions across the U.S., including Wellesley College, the University of Maryland, College Park, Hunter College, San Quentin State Prison and Harvard University, where he was awarded a Certificate of Teaching Excellence. Included on the list, “Inspiring Activists: Trailblazers and leaders in the community and in the struggle for social justice” by former San Francisco Supervisor Jane Kim, Terry has participated in several national and community-based Asian American organizations across the U.S., including a stint as Executive Director of Hyphen, an award-winning nonprofit news and culture magazine that tells the stories of Asian America with substance, style and sass. Dr. Park received his PhD in Cultural Studies with a designated emphasis in Studies of Performance and Practice from the University of California, Davis.
Longer Bio:
Dr. Terry K Park (he/him) is the founding director of Maum Consulting, an Asian American Studies-based educational social enterprise offering (or will offer) heart & body-centered courses, curriculum assistance, co-conspiratorial development, and storytelling curation in service of regenerative liberation for all. The youngest son of Korean War survivors and refuge migrants, Dr. Park was born on the settled homelands of the Acjachemen and Tongva peoples in current-day Orange County, California. He spent the majority of his childhood on the unceded ancestral lands of the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe (San Jose, California) and the traditional and ancestral homelands of the Shoshone, Paiute, Goshute and Ute Tribes (Salt Lake City, Utah). He graduated from Seoul International School in the divided peninsula of Korea.
Dr. Park is a published, interdisciplinary researcher.
Dr. Park holds a BA in International Studies (geographic concentration in Latin America) from Vassar College, an MA from the Gallatin School of Individualized Study (“Cultures and Performances of the Korean Diaspora”) at New York University, and a PhD in Cultural Studies, with a designated emphasis in Studies of Performance and Practice, from the University of California, Davis.
At UC Davis, Dr. Park was a Provost’s Dissertation Year Fellowship in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences. He also received support from the Association of Asian Studies, the Korea Foundation, and the UC Washington Program to conduct dissertation research at the National Archives II while serving as a graduate summer intern at the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center under the directorship of Dr. Konrad Ng. Under the guidance of his chair Dr. Sunaina Maira, Dr. Park’s dissertation, “De/militarizing Empire: The Korean DMZ,” offers a critical cultural history of the Korean demilitarized zone—the militarized border that divides the Korean peninsula—as a contested space through which US Cold War liberal empire emerged.
Dr. Park’s published and interviewed expertise in race, cultural history, and media production has advanced the understanding of the Korean War, U.S. Cold War military empire, and Asian American culture. One of his dissertation chapters, on the video work “Salt Transfer Cycle” by acclaimed Korean American conceptual artist Michael Joo, was published as the lead essay in a special issue on Asian American performance artist in the peer-reviewed journal MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the U.S. Another chapter, on Cold War representations of the American DMZ border guard, was published in Critical Military Studies. His other articles, book reviews, and policy reports have been published in the journal Pacific Affairs, the anthologies Asian Americans: An Encyclopedia of Social, Cultural, Economic, and Political History and Encyclopedia of Asian American Folklore, and the US-Korea Institute at Johns Hopkins University’s 38 North. His co-authored op-ed (with Christine Ahn and Kathleen Richards of Women Cross DMZ) on the relationships among U.S. military empire, gendered anti-Asian violence, and the 2021 Atlanta Spa Massacre was published in The Nation magazine.
Dr. Park is a trained, award-winning teacher.
While pursuing his doctorate, Dr. Park served as a teaching assistant in such departments and programs as Sociology, Anthropology, Religious Studies, and Asian American Studies, which awarded him Outstanding TA in Asian American Studies for his ability to facilitate inclusive, challenging, and engaging discussion sections. For one academic year, he served as an adjunct lecturer in the Asian American Studies Program at Hunter College in New York City under the directorship of renowned writer, translator, educator, and artist Jennifer Hayashida. There, drawing on his long-time involvement in grassroots, community-based social justice organizations, Dr. Park invited Damayan Migrant Workers Association and Nodutdol for Korean Community Development to give guest lectures in his introductory Asian American Studies course, as well as acclaimed film director and comic book writer Greg Pak to speak in his Asian American media course. Finally, Dr. Park volunteered to design and teach a course on Asian American Theater for the Prison University Project (now known as Mount Tamalpais College) at San Quentin State Prison.
Upon receiving his doctorate, Dr. Park taught Asian, American, and Asian American Studies at four higher education institutions across the U.S.
As Visiting Assistant Professor of Asian/Asian American Studies at Miami University of Ohio, Dr. Park launched a Google Hangout-enabled speaker series. Noted Asian American cultural creators and commentators such as writer Jeff Yang, blogger Jenn Fang, and playwright Wajahat Ali discussed with his students how race, gender, and other social forces informs their work.
As a jointly-appointed visiting lecturer in the Writing and American Studies Programs at Wellesley College, Dr. Park helped elevate Asian American Studies at one of the elite all women’s colleges in the U.S. He taught courses in Asian American media, performance, and the Korean War in U.S. culture. He also designed, oversaw, and executed an interactive, multimedia Korean War oral history project.
As a full-time lecturer in the History & Literature program at Harvard University, Dr. Park helped build Asian American and Ethnic Studies through his teaching, mentorship, and advocacy. He taught a course on Asian American Cultural Studies, for which he was awarded the competitive Certificate of Excellence in Teaching from the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning. He also taught three senior theses, all of which received high honors designations, and one of which won the of Perry Miller Prize, awarded to a History & Literature senior thesis of high distinction on a topic in the field of American Studies. Alongside dedicated student and faculty activists and building on decades of struggle for Ethnic Studies at Harvard, Dr. Park helped establish a History & Literature subfield in Ethnic Studies, a significant stepping stone towards the robust support of Asian American Studies at Harvard.
As the only full-time, teaching-focused faculty member in the Asian American Studies Program (AAST) at the University of Maryland, College Park, Dr. Park was instrumental in building one of the fastest-growing minors on Maryland’s flagship campus. In his four years, Dr. Park taught Teaching six courses annually, including the majority of AAST’s humanities offerings and two interdisciplinary gateway courses, Dr. Park developed and taught over ten interdisciplinary Asian American Studies courses, ranging from introductory to advanced, as well as independent studies. He also worked course-equivalent assignments related to program-building and administration, such as curriculum development, committee participation, and co-curricular programming. Programming included overseeing and hosting AAST’s Chandni Kumar Lecture on Asian Americans and Activism, an annual lecture series featuring a D.C.-based Asian American community leader, as well as events where he tapped his extensive network to invite noted Asian American changemakers like Kal Penn and Karen Chee. These events fostered close connections with and between our minors, scholars, alumni, and local Asian American community organizations and contributed to the program’s tremendous growth.
Dr. Park’s teaching extended to public-facing, student-led, multimedia projects. When UMD suspended the Spring 2020 semester because of the COVID pandemic, Dr. Park quickly but carefully restructured the last unit to focus on the historical relationships among U.S. public health crises, “medical nativism,” and the resulting anti-Asian violence that targeted three Chinatowns in the U.S.. From these case studies, students then contributed critical content, helpful resources, and personal reflections (including poetry, hip hop, and cartoons) to a website, “COVID-19 and Anti-Asian Racism: Contexts, Resources, Reflections,” that he envisioned and executed in collaboration with staff from the Asian American Studies Program and Multicultural Involvement Community Advocacy. In light of the most recent resurgence of anti-Asian violence, UMD’s Vice President for Diversity and Inclusion – with whom Dr. Park served on the University Senate’s Equity, Diversity, & Inclusion Committee – and the Vice President for Student Affairs spotlighted the website in an email to the campus.
Secondly, Dr. Park oversaw an interactive oral history project at UMD called Memories of Militarism and War: Asian American Voices From the DMV. Students were trained to conduct oral history interviews with local, predominantly Southeast Asian and Korean American refugee, immigrant, and transracial adoptee survivors of US-involved wars in the Asian-Pacific region. The interviews were then uploaded to a website and encoded as unique QR codes, which were attached to individualized bojagi, a sack used by Korean War refugees. These oral history bojagis were then placed at high-traffic areas of campus, allowing university and community members to access their contents by scanning the QR codes with their smartphones.
In recognition of Dr. Park’s innovative teaching of Asian American studies, he contributed an invited essay to the forthcoming anthology, Teaching Asian American Studies.
Dr. Park is a social justice, community-engaged storyteller.
Before graduate school, Dr. Park was an actor and performance artist. Inspired by Asian American performance artists like Brenda Wong Aoki, Dan Kwong, and Nobuko Miyamoto, trained by Frank and Jill Gerrish at the Junior Shakespeare Company (SLC), Augusto Boal of Theater of the Oppressed, Anna Deavere Smith, Judith Sloan, and Obie award-winning actor Ernest Abuba, and shaped by such disparate influences like Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and John Leguizamo, Terry wrote and performed his own semi-autobiographical, multimedia solo show, 38th Parallels. It received a two-week off-Broadway run with Pan Asian Repertory Theater. In its review, Backstage proclaimed, “Park succeeds often enough to distinguish himself and his voice from the crowd.”
More soon…
Bruce Lee mural artist: Luke Dragon / @lukedragon_ifa