Featured
Plenary on LGBTQ Scholarship
David L. Eng is Richard L. Fisher Professor of English as well as Graduate Chair of the English Department at the University of Pennsylvania. He is also Professor in the Program in Asian American Studies, the Program in Comparative Literature & Literary Theory, and the Program in Gender, Sexuality & Women’s Studies. His areas of specialization include American literature, Asian American studies, Asian diaspora, psychoanalysis, critical race theory, queer studies, gender studies, and visual culture.
Eng is author of The Feeling of Kinship: Queer Liberalism and the Racialization of Intimacy (Duke, 2010) and Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America (Duke, 2001). He is co-editor with David Kazanjian of Loss: The Politics of Mourning (California, 2003) and with Alice Y. Hom of Q & A: Queer in Asian America (Temple, 1998, winner of a Lambda Literary Award and Association of Asian American Studies Book Award). In addition, he is co-editor of two special issues of the journal Social Text: with Teemu Ruskola and Shuang Shen, “China and the Human” (2011/2012), and with Judith Halberstam and José Esteban Muñoz, “What’s Queer about Queer Studies Now?” (2005). His current book project, “Reparations and the Human,” investigates the relationship between political and psychic genealogies of reparation in Cold War Asia. Eng is also completing a co-authored book with Shinhee Han, A Dialogue on Racial Melancholia: On the Social and Psychic Lives of Asian Americans, a collection of psychoanalytic case histories and commentaries on Asian immigrants in the diaspora (Duke, forthcoming).
At Penn, Eng is a founding convenor of the Faculty Working Group on Race and Empire Studies as well as a member of the Executive Board of Gender, Sexuality & Women’s Studies and the Alice Paul Center. In 2013-14, he helped to organize a Mellon Sawyer Seminar on “Race, Across Time and Space” sponsored by the Mellon Foundation. Eng is on the Board of Trustees of the Development Fund for the American Studies Association as well as a member of the editorial boards of Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Queeries: A Journal of Queer Studies, Social Text, and Studies in Gender and Sexuality: Psychoanalysis, Cultural Studies, Treatment, Research. He is a former member of the Board of Directors of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop and a former Chair of the Board of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies in New York City.