Ph.D. Princeton University 2021

M.A. Princeton University 2017

B.A. University of Pennsylvania 2013

 

Janet Kong-Chow is a Rising Scholars Postdoctoral Fellow in American Studies and English. Her teaching and research are broadly concerned with diaspora, imperialism, and North American culture, examining overlapping processes of racialization, power, and language. She is committed to interdisciplinary research, specializing in theories of racial capitalism, the environmental humanities, postcolonialism, Black studies, Asian diaspora, and legal studies.

 

Her first book project, Securing the Crisis: Race and the Poetics of Risk, considers metaphors of risk as a corollary to 21st century American crisis and racialization. Reading relationally across poetry, photography, archives, policy, film, and sculpture, the project advances theories of a “poetics of risk” and contends that racialized and marginalized subjects deploy epistemological abstraction and fragmentation not only as resistance, but to rework conventions of periodicity, materialism, and reality we accept as hegemonic. Her second manuscript, Curating Aesthetics of Race: Cultures of the Modern American Archive, locates dispossession, anticipation of emergency, and speculative accumulation as critical affective questions at the intersection of U.S. migration, diaspora, race-making, and cultural preservation.