Jennifer Cho

Lecturer

jencho@umd.edu

 

Bio

Jennifer Cho comes to the Asian American Studies program at University of Maryland from Boston University, where she was Visiting Assistant Professor of English and taught courses in Asian American literature and film, contemporary fiction, and gender studies. Her teaching interests align closely with her interdisciplinary research, which spans Asian American literary and cultural production, gender and sexuality studies, women of color feminisms, histories of (neo)colonialism in Asia, theories of trauma and affect, and foodways (a nod to her former career as a chef). Currently, Jennifer is completing a book that rescripts expressions of grief and racial melancholy as potent, decolonizing responses to Asian American identity formation and cultural memory. Her work has been published (or is forthcoming) in MELUS, Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism, Modern Language Studies and the Routledge Companion to Literature and Social Justice.

 List of teaching/research topics:

  • Asian American literature, film and culture

  • Women’s, gender and sexuality studies

  • AAPI, Women of Color, and transnational feminisms

  • Intersections between literature and the arts and social justice initiatives

Education

Grand Diploma in Culinary Arts, French Culinary Institute

PhD English, George Washington University (2010)

MA Humanities and Social Thought, New York University (2005)

BA English, New York University (2003)

Research and Publications

Cho, Jennifer. 'It hurts, that's all I know': Hyperempathy, Race and Gender Disability, and Possibilities of Social Animacy in Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower." Routledge Companion to Literature and Social Justice (forthcoming 2023) 

Cho, Jennifer. “In Pursuit of Eudaimonia: Activating Empathy through Connected Reading and Writing Processes.” Modern Language Studies (forthcoming 2022) 

Cho, Jennifer. "'We Were Born from Beauty': Dis/Inheriting Genealogies of Refugee and Queer Shame in Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous." MELUS 47.1 (2022): 130-153. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/melus/mlac024

Cho, Jennifer. “Mel-han-cholia as Political Practice in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée.” Meridians 11.1 (2011): 36–61. DOI: https://doi.org/10.2979/meridians.11.1.36. (Reprinted in 2020 Meridians 20th Anniversary Reader)

Cho, Jennifer. “Touching Pasts in The Shadow of No Towers: 9/11 and Art Spiegelman’s Comix of Memory.” The Popular Avant-Garde, edited by Renee Silverman, Rodopi. (2010): 201-211. 

Courses

  • AAST200 Introduction to Asian American Studies

  • AAST355 Asian Americans in Film

  • AAST498G Advanced Topics in Asian American Studies: Asian American Women and Gender

  • AAST298G Special Topics in Asian American Studies: Asian American Foodways