Shirley Tang

When Shirley Tang of UMass Boston was appointed the Inaugural Endowed Distinguished Professor for Asian American Studies at UMass Boston in the fall of 2023, Chancellor Marcelo Suárez-Orozco said that “Dr. Tang has demonstrated clear, sustained leadership in Asian American Studies programmatic initiatives with a deeply held sense of mission and long-term purpose. We believe that Professor Tang is uniquely qualified to be the inaugural holder of the Distinguished Professorship for Asian American Studies at UMass Boston.” At the heart of Dr. Tang’s work is a commitment to helping the diverse Asian-American students at UMass Boston develop fluency with digital media to share the rich complexity of their experiences, thus personalizing the stories of those too often considered in undifferentiated ways. 

Speaking at the 2022 Ikeda Forum for Intercultural Dialogue, Dr. Tang explained that a key goal for her is to help students bring a critical eye to storytelling, often looking for what is buried or hidden because of such factors, or layers, as race or language. The sharing of stories, she has found, is an essential mode of dialogue. Furthermore, “one of the most challenging and rewarding aspects of the work with the digital storytelling that I do,” said Dr. Tang, “is enabling our students and young people to believe that their stories do matter.”