People
Faculty
Yu-Fang Cho
Titles
- Associate Professor of English
- Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
- Asian/Asian American Studies Affiliate
Education
- Ph.D. in Literatures in English, Literature Department, University of California at San Diego, September 2004
- M.A. in English, Department of English, University of Wisconsin at Madison
- B.A. With Distinction in Foreign Languages and Literatures, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan
Teaching and Research Interests
- Transnational American Studies
- Comparative Ethnic Studies
- Transnational Feminist Studies
- Nineteenth-Century U.S. Print Culture
Selected Publications
- Uncoupling American Empire: Cultural Politics of Deviance and Unequal Difference, 1890-1910 (Albany: SUNY, 2013).
- “Bodies as Genealogical Maps: Cristina García’s Monkey Hunting.” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 14.5 (March 2013)
- “Vision of Pacific Destiny: Imperial Geographies in the Overland Monthly, 1898-1900.”U.S. Popular Print Culture, 1860-1920 (Oxford History of Popular Print Culture Series), ed. Christine Bold. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012.
- “Cultural Nationalism, Orientalism, Imperial Ambivalence: The Colored American Magazine and Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins,” Journal of Transnational American Studies 3.2 (October 2011).
- “Domesticating the Aliens Within: Sentimental Benevolence in Late Nineteenth-Century California Magazines.” American Quarterly 61.1 (March 2009): 113-136.
- “‘Yellow Slavery,’ Narratives of Rescue, and Sui Sin Far/Edith Maude Eaton’s ‘Lin John’ (1899).” Journal of Asian American Studies 12.1 (April 2009): 35-63.
- “A Romance of (Miscege)Nations: Ann Sophia Stephens’s Malaeska and the 1830 Indian Removal Act.” Arizona Quarterly 63.1 (Spring 2007): 1-25.
- “Rewriting Exile, Remembering Home, Remapping Empire: Hualing Nieh’s Mulberry and Peach.” Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism. 5.1 (Fall 2004): 157-200.
Grants & Awards
- Assigned Research Appointment, Miami University of Ohio, Spring 2007, Spring 2014
- Altman Fellow, Miami University, 2013-14 (declined).
- Altman Faculty Scholar, Miami University Ohio, 2012-13.
- Summer Research Appointment, Miami University of Ohio, Summer 2007, 2012
- 2007 NEH Summer Stipends, Miami University Junior Faculty Nominee
- Honors Program Summer Fellowship, Miami University, Summer 2006
- College of Arts and Sciences Teaching Effective Grant (collaboration with Madelyn Detloff and Ann Feurer), Miami University, 2006-2007
- Center for Writing Excellence Faculty Grant, Miami University, 2006-2007
- Summer Credit Workshop Incentive Grant, Office of Continuing Education, Miami University, 2005-2006, 2006-2007
- Summer Research Appointment, Miami University, Summer 2005
- Mayers Fellow, Huntington Library, 2004-2005
- Pacific Rim Research Program Dissertation Fellowship, University of California, 2003-2004
- Center for the Humanities Dissertation Fellowship, University of California, San Diego, 2003-2004
- Faculty Fellowship, Women’s Studies Program, University of California, Irvine, 2003-2004 (declined)
- Faculty Fellowship, English Department, University of California, Riverside, 2003-2004 (declined)
- Bancroft Library Study Award (Kenneth E. and Dorothy V. Hill Fellowship), University of California, Berkeley, 2002-2003
- Institute of Global Conflict and Cooperation Dissertation Fellowship, University of California, 2002-2003
- James D. Kline Award for International Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara, 2002-2003
Work in Progress
Dr. Cho’s book, Uncoupling American Empire: Cultural Politics of Deviance and Unequal Difference, 1890-1910, examines how “the marriage question” critically shaped cultural imaginaries of the relationships among Chinese immigrants, African Americans, and white working women when the United States became a trans-Pacific and hemispheric empire in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This book reframes the familiar period construction of Chinese immigrants as “sexual deviants” within new contexts of comparative racial formation shaped by U.S-Asia relations. Foregrounding the triangulation of slavery, yellow slavery, and white slavery as interlocking processes of gendered racial formations, Uncoupling American Empire unravels how white heterosexual monogamy was legally and culturally institutionalized during this period through stigmatizing different sexual practices of people who provided indispensable “unfree” labor to the U.S. labor market. Meanwhile, such historical processes also animated cultural representations that problematized mandatory intra-racial heterosexual monogamy as a viable path toward freedom and equality. By tracing recurring tropes that signify the tension between slavery and marriage in a wide range of cultural representations, including literature, journalism, photographs, political cartoons, and legal documents, Uncoupling American Empire reveals how the systemic divisions among racialized and gendered subjects produced by the period’s key criterion for humanity and U.S. national inclusion—sexual conformity—were negotiated and contested in national and transnational cultural representations about U.S.–Asia relations.