The Hearst Professional-in-Residence program provides fellowships for professionals to visit CU-Boulder each semester and provide helpful lessons and advice to students and faculty. Its purpose is to introduce nationally known, accomplished professionals to our students to enrich their studies.
The program is funded by the William Randolph Hearst Foundation.
2016 Professional Angie Chuang is an associate professor of journalism at American University’s School of Communication in Washington, D.C. Her research and teaching focus on race and media. She was an award-winning reporter for The Hartford Courant, the Los Angeles Times and The Oregonian, where she launched one of the first regional newspaper race beats.
Race, Violence and 'Sincerely Yours:' Letter-writing as a narrative response to the news
- Date: Sept. 7, 2016
- Time: 5:00 p.m.
- Location: Humanities 1B80
When news of racially motivated police shootings, hate crimes and bitter campus protests permeated Angie Chuang's class on race and journalism at American University, the issues felt too emotional and volatile to address only with traditional reporting assignments or academic analysis. Chuang led her 19 students on an experimental exercise: randomly select a name—Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Vincent Chin, NYPD officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu—of someone who lost their life in racially motivated violence, then research and write a personal letter to the deceased. The simple exercise grew into a student-produced, self-published book, “Gasping for Air: Letters About Race and Social Injustice.”
The letters provide insights into the power of personal narrative in confronting and learning about race, violence and other urgent and challenging issues. In disciplines that are actively wrestling with the roles of objectivity, first-person narrative and appropriate (or profitable) forms of news delivery vs. storytelling, what can the deceptively simple act of composing a letter tell us?
The letters will be read by Chuang and her former student D. Ashley Campbell—a PhD student in media studies at CU Boulder—who participated in the letter-writing project.
Campbell holds an MA in Journalism and Public Affairs from American University and an MA in religious studies from the University of Chicago Divinity School. She has interned at Interfaith Voices, the independent public radio show, and has written for The Washington Post.