Before the Fire Dogs Steal the Sun: A book talk by Crystal Mun-hye Baik

Sponsors: Asian American and Asian Diaspora Studies Program, Asian American Research Center, Center for Korean Studies

In this book talk, Crystal Mun-hye Baik (sher/her) will read from her forthcoming book Before the Fire Dogs Steal the Sun (Duke University Press, April 2026). Before the Fire Dogs Steal the Sun is an intimate cultural history of war, illness, banishment, and estrangement told through the experiential lens of Baik’s family. Beginning with her father’s death and mother’s psychiatric hold in 2022, Baik situates her parents’ lives within the enmeshed narratives of Japanese colonialism, war, and transoceanic migration, examining Korean diasporic grief as a felt form of thinking and writing, rather than an object of study. In doing so, she reckons with diasporic genealogies of precarity that have configured the everyday lives of her parents and ancestral communities. Blending different genres from narrative prose to visual essay, epistles to ancestral mourning rites, Before the Fire Dogs Steal the Sun is a meditation on the personal and ethical entanglements scholars must confront when they are implicated in the histories of violence they study.

Speaker: Crystal Mun-hye Baik, (she/her) is a feminist oral historian, writer, and memory worker who resides in the unceded land of the Tongva and Cahuilla peoples, and Chair and Associate Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies at UC Riverside. Currently, Professor Baik is the co-editor of the Critical Militarization Studies Book Series at University of Michigan Press and was recently selected as a Mellon New Directions Fellow (25-28). Her second book, Before the Fire Dogs Steal the Sun: An Elegy, is forthcoming with Duke University Press (April 2026).

Admission Information:
Please RSVP here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScoJ7j5ZKJWPFonWgQrxu_a5HW2O8aLKzEJTXp7HzXGUnKsig/viewform

If you require accommodation for a disability in order to fully participate in this event, please contact the event organizer with as much advance notice as possible and at least 7-10 days in advance of the event.

Contact Info:
Vernadette Gonzalez
510-664-4485
vernadette@berkeley.edu

Access Coordinator:
Vernadette Gonzalez, vernadette@berkeley.edu, 510-664-4485