DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH

Biography

Michelle N. Huang (she/her/hers, Ph.D. English and Women’s Studies, Pennsylvania State University), jointly appointed in the English Department and in the Asian American Studies Program, has research and teaching interests in contemporary Asian American literature, posthumanism, feminist science studies, the environmental humanities, and the medical humanities.

Her book, Racial Beings: Experiments in Asian American New Materialisms, is forthcoming with the ANIMA series at Duke University Press in March 2026. She currently working on a second project on Asian American racialization and biomedicine.

Michelle’s work appears in American Literature, Contemporary Literature, Journal of Asian American Studies, Amerasia, and American Quarterly, among other venues. A film essay she created on science fictional representations of Asian Americans is available for viewing online at the Smithsonian Asia Pacific American Center.

Find more at: http://www.michellenhuang.com

Specializations

Environmental Humanities, Asian American Literature, Gender & Sexuality Studies, Critical Race Studies, 20th- & 21st-century American Literature, Science, Technology & Society Studies

Selected Publications:

• “Solidarity in Incommensurability: Ethnic Studies and the Environmental Humanities.” Co-authored with Carlos Alonso Nugent. American Quarterly 77.1 (March 2025): 133-144.
• INHUMAN FIGURES: Robots, Clones and Aliens (2021). 24-minute research film essay. Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center.
• “Do Better Now.” ASAP/Journal 6.2 (May 2021 issue on “New Worlds of Speculation”): 303-307.
• “Racial Disintegration: Biomedical Futurity at the Environmental Limit.” American Literature 93.3 (September 2021).
• “Matériel Culture: The Militourist Aesthetic of Mary McCarthy’s Vietnam War Reportage.” Contemporary Literature 61.2 (Summer 2020): 162-193.
• “‘feeling something as luminous’: an interview with Mei-mei Berssenbrugge and Teddy Yoshikami.” Tripwire: A Journal of Poetics 16 (2020): 192-212.
• “On ‘Resisting Extinction,’” Verge: Studies in Global Asia 2 (Fall 2019; “Forgetting Wars”): 99-106.
• “The Posthuman Subject in/of Asian American Literature,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature (February 2019): 1-23. 
• “Ecologies of Entanglement in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch,” Journal of Asian American Studies 1 (February 2017): 95-117. *Winner of the 2016 Bruns Essay Prize from the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts (SLSA)
• “Creative Evolution: Narrative Symbiogenesis in Larissa Lari’s Salt Fish Girl.” Amerasia 2 (2016): 118-138.
• “Rematerializations of Race,” Lateral: Journal of the Cultural Studies Association 1 (May 2017).
• “The Synaptic Poetics of Kimiko Hahn’s Brain Fever,” Post45: Contemporaries series on Asian/American (Anti-)Bodies (December 2016).
• “In Uniform Code: Catherine Barkley’s Wartime Nursing Service in A Farewell to Arms,” Twentieth-Century Literature 2 (Summer 2016): 197-222.
• “Hospice Comics: Representations of Patient and Family Experience of Illness and Death in Graphic Novels,” Co-authored with MK Czerwiec, R.N. Journal of Medical Humanities2 (June 2017): 95-113.