Tina Chen

Professional Bio

I am interested in speculative fictions, the imaginable ageography of Global Asias, and the genres of academic labor. I was initially trained as an Asian Americanist but over the last decade, my work has focused on exploring the possibilities and limits of theorizing “Global Asias” as an epistemology and method that simultaneously recognizes and challenges the distinctions separating area studies and diaspora studies. As the founding editor of Verge: Studies in Global Asias, an award-winning journal that brings Asian studies, Asian American studies, and Asian diaspora studies into non-aligned relation, and the founding director of the PSU Global Asias Initiative, I am committed to developing platforms that encourage multidisciplinary engagement and the cross-pollination of knowledge across disciplinary and field boundaries. Recent publications include “Global Asias: Method, Architecture, Praxis” (Journal of Asian Studies 80.4, 2021); “Global Asias—On the Structural Incoherence of Imaginable Ageography” (Asian American Literature in Transition, 1996-2020, 2021); and “(The) Transpacific Turns” (Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian American Literature and Culture, 2020). I am currently working on two books: Tactics and Theories for a Global Asias Praxis, a collaborative project that will be published as the inaugural volume of a new Global Asias book series with the University of Hawai’i Press, and Alien Forms: Global Asias and Other Speculative Genres of Academic Labor, a monograph that questions the ways in which academic labor has been parsed into the categories of “research, teaching, and service” and argues for a more expansive notion of scholarly work.  

If you are interested in learning more about Global Asias and how I have approached it, this interview with the Global Asian Studies program at the University of Tokyo offers a succinct overview.

I teach graduate level courses on contemporary ethnic American literatures, speculative fiction, professionalization, and academic writing. My undergraduate teaching includes courses on Asian American literary and cultural studies, witchy women in contemporary literature, multi-ethnic literature, and genre-focused classes on “novel novels,” memoirs, and 20^th-century US drama.

I am deeply committed to mentorship and training graduate students. My advisees work in the fields of Asian American studies, Asian diaspora studies, Global Asias, comparative multiethnic literatures (including African American and Latino/a literatures), and transpacific studies, using a diverse range of critical approaches (posthumanism, settler colonial studies, indigeneity, critical ethnic studies, diaspora studies, gender studies, visual culture, and genre). I have placed students in both TT academic jobs and non-academic positions and create individualized programs to help each student achieve their personal and professional goals.

Here are some examples of projects I have supervised:

Molecular Aesthetics: Race, Form, and Matter in Contemporary Asian American Literature

Asian America in the Age of Professionalization

Humanimal Narratives: Genre and Animality in Contemporary Ethnic Literatures

Independence’s Others: Decolonial Taiwan in the Transpacific