Chris Eng

Chris A. Eng is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Maryland, College Park. His research is primarily situated at the intersections of Asian American cultural studies and queer of color critique. His writings and teaching engage the fields of critical ethnic studies, performance studies, and post45 literatures alongside theorizations of affect, diaspora, and empire. At UMD, he has recently taught an undergraduate course on “Queer Youth” and the graduate course “Critical Ethnic Literary Studies.”

A recipient of the CLAGS Fellowship Award, his first book, Extravagant Camp: The Queer Abjection of Asian America, https://nyupress.org/9781479834662/extravagant-camp/, (Feb 2025), was published by NYU Press in the Sexual Cultures series. In it, Eng illuminates Asian American camp as a prevalent yet underappreciated cultural strategy for contesting accounts of racialization that overly rely on terms of abjection. The book follows campy performances that imaginatively restage the camps that have been central to dominant narratives of Asian American history: Chinese railroad labor, Japanese American incarceration, Vietnam War refugee resettlement, and counterinsurgency camps across US imperial entanglements in the Philippines. Theorizing Asian American camp as both a performance strategy and reading practice, Eng examines how artists drag up the maligned racial roles of the coolie, the internee, the refugee, and the diva to make different sense of these histories. Extravagant Camp shows how Asian American camp takes on queerness as a resource to enliven modes of joy, beauty, and pleasure within structures of constraint, revealing the types of power camp retrieves for racialized communities in the face of abjection. 

Eng’s writings have also appeared in such venues as American Quarterly, GLQ, Journal of Asian American Studies, Lateral, MELUS, and Theatre Journal. His 2020 essay on queer shame in Justin Chin’s poetry received an honorable mention for the Crompton-Noll Article Prize, awarded jointly by the GLQ Caucus of the Modern Language Association and Queer/Trans Caucus of the American Studies Association. Additionally, his essays have appeared in two edited collections: Asian American Literature in Transition Volume Three, 1965-1996 (Cambridge University Press), which received an American Library Association’s 2022 Choice “Outstanding Academic Title” award and Q&A: Voices from Queer Asian North America (Temple University Press), a 2022 Lambda Literary Award Finalist for LGBTQ Anthology. He is currently at work on his second book project titled White Gay Fantasies: A Queer Romance for the Asiatic Presence.

Eng’s work has been recognized by the Institute for Citizens & Scholars through a Career Enhancement Fellowship and by the WashU in St. Louis Graduate Student Senate through an Outstanding Faculty Mentor Award. In 2023, Chris received the Early Career Achievement Award from the Association for Asian American Studies.