Kandice Chuh is a professor of English and American studies at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center, where she is also appointed to the faculty of the M.A. in Liberal Studies program. She was hired at the Graduate Center as a core member of the Mellon Interdisciplinarity Committee on Globalization and Social Change, and this year is a faculty fellow in the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics. Chuh is also the coordinator for the Graduate Center’s American Studies Certificate Program, and was one of the principal organizers of the Revolutionizing American Studies initiative launched at the Graduate Center in 2011. Prior to joining the CUNY faculty in 2010, she was a member of the English Department faculty and affiliated to the American studies and women’s studies departments and the Asian American studies program, at the University of Maryland, College Park. She joined the University of Maryland faculty upon completing her PhD in English Language and Literature at the University of Washington, Seattle in 1996. At the University of Washington, Chuh regularly taught in the American Ethnic Studies department as well as in English. Before going to graduate school, Chuh worked as a litigation legal assistant in New York City. She received a B.A. in English and Women’s Studies from Colgate University in 1989.  Her published work includes a monograph, Imagine Otherwise: on Asian Americanist Critique (Duke UP, 2003), which was honored with the ASA’s Lora Romero First Book Award; a volume co-edited with Karen Shimakawa, Orientations: Mapping Studies in the Asian Diaspora (Duke UP, 2001); and numerous essays and book chapters in such venues as Social Text, Public Culture, American Literary History, the Journal of Asian American Studies, and the Cambridge Companion volumes on Asian American literary history and literary studies.  A second monograph titled The Difference Aesthetics Makes: On the Humanities ‘after Man,’ will be published by Duke University Press.

Chuh teaches a wide range of subject matter, including courses on Asian American literatures, aesthetics, critical theory, decolonial thought, queer theory, law and literature, Cuba, indigeneity and race, the Black Pacific, professionalization, and introduction to doctoral studies.  She is the recipient of several awards recognizing her mentoring and advising, especially of graduate students.

Chuh has actively participated in the life of such professional associations as the Association for Asian American Studies and the Modern Language Association. She is also a member of the Social Text collective and is a member of the advisory boards of several journals. Much of this kind of extracurricular work has been for the American Studies Association: she has served as the ASA’s delegate to the American Council of Learned Societies and a member of the National Council; Chuh has also twice been a part of the annual meeting program committee (2001-02; 2013-14), and has served as well as on what used to be known as the Women’s Committee (1997-2001) and the Minority Scholars Committee (2011-14). Then-ASA president Mary Helen Washington appointed her to the Presidential Advisory Task Force on Relations with Ethnic Studies Programs, Faculty and Students (1999-2002).