2022 Summer Residents
Wei En Chan
Wei En Chan is a Singaporean countertenor. He leads an active career in Asia and North America performing the major works of Bach and Handel and has appeared in leading roles with numerous organizations. Wei En earned his M.M. in Voice Performance from the New England Conservatory, where he studied with Dr. Ian Howell, and his B.M. from Ithaca College, where he studied with Professor Carol McAmis. Wei En started his vocal training with eminent Singaporean musicians such as Toh Ban Sheng and Tay Cheng-Jim. Among his many professional affiliations, Wei En is also the founder and Artistic Director of Camerata Nova Anglia’s recital series devoted to exploring the stories of POC singers. During his residency Wei En will be learning repertoire for a recital series focusing on songs from Singapore, Korea, and Colombia. This preparation is part of a fall recital series where Wei En is working with immigrant professional singers from Korea and Colombia to craft a recital program that best showcases songs from their countries of origin through spoken stories from their own lives.
Caroline Cheung
Caroline Cheung (she/her) is a University of Iowa English PhD Candidate with graduate certificates in Gender, Women’s, & Sexuality Studies and College Teaching. She works at the intersections of women of color feminisms, theories of state violence, transformative justice and prison abolitionism. She researches the ways myths of white supremacy and proximities to whiteness uphold the prison-industrial complex (and vice versa). She believes that the creative and imaginative work of literature serves as revolutionary gestures, providing both experiences and frameworks for transformative justice and community accountability. Knowing that scholarship must be accessible and active and that critical theory elevates grassroots activism, Caroline prioritizes the collaboration between public scholarship and collective praxis in her work as an activist-scholar. During her residency stay, Caroline will be working on annotating the sources for her dissertation as well as translating her research into political zines.
Tommy Conners
Tommy Conners is a Lecturer on History & Literature at Harvard University where he teaches and researches on US Latinx culture and history, legal studies, and queer studies. He holds a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania and a BA from Ithaca College. During his residency Tommy will devote focused time to convening a collected anthology he will be co-editing with a scholar of Asian American Studies. The anthology, entitled Colorblind: Liberal Racism from Past to Present, will extend critiques of colorblind law and social relations beyond the Black-white binary to engage Latinx, Asian American, and Indigenous histories and collectives.
Cándida F. Jáquez
Cándida F. Jáquez was born in Hanford, California, and raised in Fresno, CA, in the Central San Joaquin Valley. Her parents grew up as migrant farmworker children. She was a first-generation college student and is a proud alumna of the Smithsonian Graduate Latino Museum Studies Program. She earned her bachelor of music degree at CSU Fresno in music history, her master of music degree in ethnomusicology at the University of Texas at Austin, and completed her doctoral studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in musicology.
Cándida is an associate professor in Music at Scripps College and is affiliate faculty in the Claremont Graduate University. She has recently been selected by the Smithsonian Institution to work with fellows in their Latino Museum Studies Program. Her specialties include Latinx traditional and popular musics with a focus on women in mariachi and feast day celebrations for the Virgin of Guadalupe at the basilica in Mexico City. During her residency she will be writing an article concerning the performance at the Beijing Olympics Opening Ceremony by the all-female mariachi ensemble, Mariachi Mujer 2000. In this article, Cándida will expose the erasure of histories regarding the Mexican descent tradition as well as the silencing and invisibility of women and their influence on the musical tradition.
Nick Kowalczyk
Nick Kowalczyk lives and works in Central New York. Born and raised in Ohio, he earned a B.S. in Journalism from Ohio University and an M.F.A. in Nonfiction Writing from the University of Iowa. He has a wide range of writerly interests and has published essays about his childhood, his racial identity, historical reenactors, an infamous axe murder, and a pet taxidermist in Salon, Phoebe, POROI, LitHub, and Ninth Letter, among other places. During his residency at Sunlit he will be working on a memoir-in-progress about race, family secrets, social class, and emotional healing that he plans to title White Asian.