Long Le-Khac

Long Le-Khac is an assistant professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis. His teaching and research interests include Asian American, Latina/o, and contemporary American literatures, race and ethnicity studies, transnational and migration studies, narrative theory, and digital humanities. His work appears in or is forthcoming in Victorian Studies, American Literature, and the n+1 book series.

This year at CCSRE he is completing a book titled Transnarrative: Giving Form to Asian and Latina/o America. It argues for comparative attention to the literary transformations developing within the two racial groups most rapidly transforming the American social landscape. The study examines how Asian American and Latina/o writers expand the capacities of decentered narrative forms to theorize the tensions that migration, diversification, and interethnic coalition building generate. Tracing the mutual development of a socially engaged form across racial groups, Transnarrative reveals common causes and historical connections and shows how interdisciplinary fields of comparative ethnic studies would gain from attending to literary form.

At CCSRE Prof. Le-Khac has completed an article for MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literatures of the U.S. on Vietnamese American fiction and its remapping of the displacements U.S. Cold War militarism generated. He is also beginning a project at the intersection of critical race studies and digital humanities methods. The first part of this project builds a database view of over a thousand pieces of Asian American literary scholarship to see how this field has redefined the racial category Asian American over time.