UCLA: Professor Grace Hong Gains Tenure in Asian American Studies and Women's Studies

The UCLA Asian American Studies Center and Department are very pleased to share the wonderful news that Dr. Grace Hong has been promoted to Associate Professor, Step II with tenure in the Department of Asian American Studies and the Interdepartmental Program in Women's Studies at UCLA. She is also an active member of the Faculty Advisory Committee of the Asian American Studies Center.

Professor Hong's research and teaching interests include women of color feminism, comparative racialization, Asian American literature and culture, and women and work in the global economy. She is the author of The Ruptures of American Capital: Women of Color Feminism and The Culture of Immigrant Labor (University of Minnesota Press, 2006), which examines women of color feminism and racialized immigrant women's cultural production as constitutive contradictions of U.S. liberalism, in both its 19th- and early 20th-century mode organized around possessive individualism and its late 20th century formation as manifest in the "flexible" organization common to global capital. She has also published a number of articles in journals such as Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism, American Literature, and Diaspora. She was a University of California President's Post-Doctoral Fellow in 2001-2002.

Dr. Hong is currently at work on a second monograph project which explores the cultures of people of color in the U.S. as knowledge-producing institutions which contradict or disorganize the ideological mechanisms by which certain lives are rendered unrecognizable or illegible as protectable and valuable. Looking at film, art, and literature by Asian American, African American, and Chicano/a authors and artists, this book traces the ways in which these texts gives us access to the heterogeneous, and productive modes of "life" that proliferate in this condition of vulnerability to death. She is also co-editing a collection entitled Strange Affinities: The Gender and Sexual Politics of Comparative Racialization, under contract with Duke University Press.

Born in Seoul, South Korea and raised in Los Angeles, Professor Hong received her B.A. in English with a minor in Asian American Studies from UCLA and went on to earn an M.A. in Asian American Studies from UCLA as well. She did her Ph.D. work at UCSD in the Department of Literature. Prior to joining the faculty at UCLA, she held positions at Princeton University and at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.