Guy Stern escaped Nazi Germany in 1937 and subsequently joined the U.S. army where he served as an interrogator of captured German soldiers. Guy and his life story are amazing. This might be our last best chance to hear what life was like in pre war Germany and WWII from someone who was there.

Explore the customs, traditions, and stories surrounding Chinese food and festivals.  Frances Kai-Hwa Wang is a journalist, essayist, speaker, activist, and poet focused on issues of diversity, race, culture, and the arts. The child of immigrants, she was born in Los Angeles, raised in Silicon Valley, and now divides her time between Michigan and the Big Island of Hawai‘i.  This event is in partnership with Culinary Historians of Ann Arbor.

U-M Center for World Performance Studies visiting puppet artist Tom Lee presents a special workshop exploring Japanese traditional puppetry techniques that have had an enormous influence on world puppetry performance. Following a short talk on bunraku-style puppetry, participants had a hands-on opportunity to handle traditional Japanese puppets and draw back the curtain on how these beautiful puppets are brought to life through skillful puppetry technique. 

Tom Lee has appeared as a puppeteer in War Horse at Lincoln Center Theatre and Madama Butterfly at the Metropolitan Opera, in addition to extensive work in Japan with his mentor, Koryu Nishikawa V.  

This event was in partnership with the University of Michigan Center for Wold Performance Studies. 

Shirley (Rusty) Schumacher was born in 1930 in Detroit. She remembers war bonds, scrap drives, and special manufacturing during World War II. She attended William and Mary College and received two master’s degrees in speech and education from the University of Michigan. Schumacher spent most of her career as a teacher at Clague Middle School. In 1985 she founded a student exchange program with Ann Arbor’s sister city, Hikone, Japan. She led a year-long stay there in 1992-93.

Well known Indian and western musicians come together to talk about the concepts behind Indian and western music, and how they collaborate to create new music. This is accompanied by a short concert where they will present music based on these concepts.

You speak a language, so you know everything about how language works, right? Wrong! In this talk, Emily covers the Top 10 things most people don’t know about language. In doing so, she dispels several common myths and reveals some fascinating facts about the systems we use every day to communicate with each other. If you’ve ever wondered how many languages there are in the world, why language death is on the rise, where grammar comes from, or how it is that kids learn language so effortlessly – this talk is for you!

Nowadays, the Chinese are famous for their food — but not for their cheeses or for their dairy products. Scholarly and popular accounts explain this through biological and cultural factors — the prevalence of lactose intolerance and xenophobia, for example. Miranda Brown, Professor of Chinese Studies, U-M Department of Asian Languages and Cultures, challenges the popular and scholarly view through a mouthwatering tour of dishes composed of curds. Dr.

Experience "Before We Remember We Dream"—a performance from the new book of Lao American speculative poetry by Bryan Thao Worra, a 2019 Joyce Fellow and a 2009 National Endowment of the Arts Fellow in Literature.

As part of the Rasa Festival, Dr. Stephen Huyler presents a fascinating talk that recounts an amazing story of the discovery of a rural Indian woman's beautiful art.

Drawing from the African American Cultural Humanities (AC) curriculum, Educator Victoria Shields leads a workshop for music and art lovers with discussion of the 2018 Washtenaw Read, Homegoing, by Yaa Gyasi. Shields examines the social and historical contexts presented in Homegoing using music — including a focus on how West Africa influenced American music — as well as visual art from the Detroit Institute of Art collection.