Kandice Chuh

Kandice Chuh faculty

Research Interests

  • 20th century U.S. literatures and American studies
  • Asian American and comparative ethnic literary studies
  • minority discourse
  • critical/queer theory and critical race studies
  • disciplinarity and difference
  • globalization and global feminisms
  • aesthetics and cultural studies

Education

  • Ph.D., University of Washington

Kandice Chuh joined the Graduate Center in 2010 as a professor in the Ph.D. Program in English and as a core member of the Mellon Committee on Globalization and Social Change. She is now a member of the faculties of Africana studies, American Studies, Liberal Studies, and Critical Social Psychology in addition to English. Chuh was a coleader of the Revolutionizing American Studies Initiative launched at the Graduate Center in Spring 2011, and has served in administrative roles in American studies, English, and the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics at the Graduate Center. From 1996 to 2010, she was a faculty member in the English department at the University of Maryland, College Park, where she was affiliated with the American studies department and the Asian American studies program and recognized for teaching and mentoring excellence. She was president of the American Studies Association from 2017-18, and has served in a variety of governance positions in the Association for Asian American Studies, the Cultural Studies Association, and the Modern Language Association.

The author of The Difference Aesthetics Makes: on the humanities ‘after Man,’ (2019), the winner of the 2021 Association for Asian American Studies Book Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Humanities and Cultural Studies: Multidisciplinary Approaches, Chuh is also author of Imagine Otherwise: On Asian Americanist Critique (2003), which won the ASA’s Lora Romero Book Award in 2004. Chuh is coeditor, with Karen Shimakawa, of Orientations: Mapping Studies in the Asian Diaspora (2001), and has published in such venues as Public CultureAmerican Literary History, Social Text, and the Journal of Asian American Studies. Chuh is broadly interested in the relationship between intellectual work and the political sphere; disciplinarity and difference; and U.S. culture and politics as matrices of power and knowledge, and she lectures widely on these topics. At the Graduate Center, she teaches courses in aesthetics, race and decolonial studies, and feminist and queer of color critique. She earned her Ph.D. in English at the University of Washington, Seattle, in 1996, and her B.A. in English and women’s studies at Colgate University in 1989.

Recent courses:

  • Asia as Study, Method, and Figure (Spring 2023)
  • Entanglements of Being, History, Aesthetics (Fall 2022)
  • Practice of the Ph.D. I (Spring 2021)
  • Orientalism and the Project of Decolonization (Fall 2020)

Books