Betsy Huang

Associate Professor of English
Department of English
Clark University
Worcester, MA 01610-1477

Phone: 508-793-7145
Email: bhuang@clarku.edu

 

 

Education

B.A. State University of New York at Buffalo, 1989
Ph.D. University of Rochester, 2004

Current Research and Teaching

Professor Huang researches and teaches representations of ethnic identities and politics in 20th-century American literature and popular culture. Her scholarship focuses on literary treatments of ethnicity in narratives about immigration, assimilation, and citizenship, and she is particularly interested in the ways in which the "ethnic" and the "American" persist as mutually exclusive terms in the American cultural consciousness. She also investigates the affinities between ethnic literature and science fiction, two bodies of work that, in her view, share similar critical and theoretical aims in their treatments of social, biological, and cultural difference.

Professor Huang's first book, Contesting Genres in Contemporary Asian American Fiction (Palgrave, 2010), examines the political implications of narrative form for Asian Americans who write highly conventionalized "genre fiction" - immigrant fiction, crime fiction, and science fiction. Her next book project will trace the history of robots and other automata in science fiction and how such a history reflects human ambivalences toward physical and intellectual labor. Her work has appeared in Journal of Asian American Studies, MELUS, and on ForeignPolicy.com, and she is the Book Review Editor of MELUS.

Professor Huang's courses include Ethnic America: Literary and Theoretical Perspectives, Fictions of Asian America, Aliens and Others in Science Fiction, Speculative Fiction, and Major American Writers II.