Tina Chen

I am interested in speculative fictions, the imaginable ageography of Global Asias, and the genres of academic labor. I was initially trained as an Asian Americanist but over the last decade, my work has focused on exploring the possibilities and limits of theorizing “Global Asias” as an epistemology and method that simultaneously recognizes and challenges the distinctions separating area studies and diaspora studies. As the founding editor of Verge: Studies in Global Asias, an award-winning journal that brings Asian studies, Asian American studies, and Asian diaspora studies into non-aligned relation, and the founding director of the PSU Global Asias Initiative, I am committed to developing platforms that encourage multidisciplinary engagement and the cross-pollination of knowledge across disciplinary and field boundaries. Recent publications include “Global Asias: Method, Architecture, Praxis” (Journal of Asian Studies 80.4, 2021); “Global Asias—On the Structural Incoherence of Imaginable Ageography” (Asian American Literature in Transition, 1996-2020, 2021); and “(The) Transpacific Turns” (Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian American Literature and Culture, 2020). I am currently working on two books: Tactics and Theories for a Global Asias Praxis, a collaborative project that will be published as the inaugural volume of a new Global Asias book series with the University of Hawai’i Press, and Alien Forms: Global Asias and Other Speculative Genres of Academic Labor, a monograph that questions the ways in which academic labor has been parsed into the categories of “research, teaching, and service” and argues for a more expansive notion of scholarly work.