Jennifer Ho, President of the Association for Asian American Studies

Throughout their history, Asians in America have faced massive racial discrimination from indentured servitude to exclusion laws through internment during World War II. Asian Americans continue to face ongoing discrimination in myriad ways. The Atlanta spa murders, while a grotesque manifestation of this history, is sadly not an isolated event. Join Michael Zeldin in his conversation with Jennifer Ho, President of the Association for Asian American Studies, Director of the Center for Humanities & the Arts and Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder in a discussion of what it means to be an Asian American and especially an Asian American woman.‍ ‍

Guest Jennifer Ho Professor, Ethnic Studies Director, Center for Humanities & the Arts University of Colorado Boulder President, Association for Asian American Studies

The daughter of a refugee father from China and an immigrant mother from Jamaica, Jennifer Ho is a professor in the department of Ethnic Studies and the director of the Center for Humanities and the Arts (CHA) at the University of Colorado Boulder. Ho received her BA in English from the University of California, Santa Barbara (1992) and her PhD in English from Boston University (2003) and had a faculty appointment at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from 2004-2019, where she taught courses in Asian American literature, contemporary multiethnic American literature, critical race studies, and intersectionality.

Ho is the author of three books: Consumption and Identity in Asian American Coming-of-Age Novels (Routledge Press, 2005), Racial Ambiguity in Asian American Culture (Rutgers University Press, 2015), which won the 2016 South Atlantic Modern Languages Association award for best monograph, and Understanding Gish Jen (University of South Carolina Press, 2015). She is co-editor of a collection of essays on race and narratology, Race, Ethnicity, and Narrative in the United States (OSU Press, 2017) and a series of teaching essays on Asian American literature, Teaching Approaches to Asian American Literature (forthcoming MLA). She has published in journals such as Modern Fiction Studies, Journal for Asian American Studies, Amerasia Journal, The Global South and has also presented at conferences such as the International Society for the Study of Narrative, American Studies Association, Modern Language Association, American Literature Association, and the Association of Asian American Studies, where she has just been elected as the incoming President, effective April 2020. Two of her current book projects are a breast cancer memoir and a family autobiography that will consider Asian Americans in the global south through the narrative of her maternal family’s immigration from Hong Kong to Jamaica to North America. In addition to her academic work, Ho is active in community engagement around issues of race and intersectionality, leading workshops on anti-racism and how to talk about race in our current political climate.

Books

Narrative, Race, and Ethnicity in the United States. Edited along with James Donahue (SUNY Potsdam) & Shaun Morgan (Tennessee Wesleyan College). Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2017.

Understanding Gish Jen. Columbia, SC: The University of South Carolina Press, 2015.

Racial Ambiguity in Asian American Culture. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2015.

Consumption and Identity in Asian American Coming-of-Age Novels. New York: Routledge Press, 2005.