Humanities in the Village with Diego Javier Luis, THE FIRST ASIANS IN THE AMERICAS (with Johaina Katinka Crisostomo)

You’re invited to the September edition of Humanities in the Village, an event series in partnership with the Alexander Grass Humanities Institute at Johns Hopkins University, which aims to make scholarship publicly accessible.

This month, the series features Dr. Diego Javier Luis, whose book The First Asians in the Americas: A Transpacific History, provides a definitive account of transpacific Asian movement through the Spanish empire—from Manila to Acapulco and beyond—and its implications for the history of race and colonization in the Americas. Dr. Johaina Katinka Crisostomo will join Dr. Luis in conversation.

Audience Q&A after the reading—all are welcome! And while you’re there, pick up some recommended titles from Bird in Hand, and enjoy the offerings of nighttime beverages.

Diego Javier Luis is the Rohrbaugh Family Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Johns Hopkins University. He specializes in the histories of colonial Latin America and the Spanish Pacific World. He is the author of The First Asians in the Americas: A Transpacific History, published with Harvard University Press in 2024. In his free time, Luis enjoys photography, hiking and fencing.

Johaina K. Crisostomo received her B.A. from Stanford University in 2011 and her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 2022. Her work thinks through the intersections between Asian/Asian American and Latinx/Latinx American literatures, engaging literature, political philosophy, religion and comparative empire studies.