Welcome Aaron Hwang

Welcome Aaron Hwang
Welcome Aaron Hwang

Sidwell’s Inaugural Faculty Chair in Asian American Studies Takes His Seat

This school year Sidwell Friends welcomed the School’s inaugural chair in Asian American Studies, Aaron Hwang. An English teacher and author of three books on Chinese cultural traditions and mythology, Hwang comes to Sidwell from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa, where he earned an MFA in fiction in 2020 and taught writing courses at the high school and undergraduate level in Iowa City. 

The new position is the third endowed chair in cultural studies funded through Sidwell’s Together We Shine campaign, which concluded its most recent phase in June, 2024.

Associate Head of School Min Kim says that Hwang’s hiring as the third endowed chair creates an opportunity for the three faculty members to develop a new strategic approach to their work that addresses student learning needs and interests at the Lower, Middle, and Upper Schools while also serving as a resource to teachers across the three divisions.

Hwang joins fellow faculty members Silvana Niazi, the inaugural Guillermina Medrano de Supervía Endowed Chair for Spanish and Latin American Studies, which was funded in 2020, and Jewell Debnam, the inaugural African and African American Studies chair, which was funded in 2023. Niazi and Debnam both teach in the history department and their classes can range from history to cultural studies, and include both regional studies and the American experience.

Kim says that while the positions might appear to mirror one another, they each have a clearly delineated mission. Hwang’s Asian American Studies position is designed to focus more tightly on the American experience of the hugely diverse Asian diaspora and to study and celebrate the breadth and richness of that experience. And he will explore those issues through the lens of literature and writing. 

Hwang says it was that vision that helped draw him to Sidwell. “This is a very exciting moment for Asian-American writers and a lot of young people are doing amazing work,” he noted. 

Hwang’s Fall Semester literature class includes works by Afghan-American, Chinese-American, Pakistani-American, and Korean-American writers. Hwang says he was drawn to Sidwell by the sense of possibility, and now that he’s in the classroom he finds that “it’s really exciting to be there with the students and to discuss the texts of these works.”

The move to Sidwell was also a return of sorts for Hwang, who grew up in Rockville, Maryland. He attended Richard Montgomery High School before getting his BA in English at Yale.

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