Ph.D. Harvard University, 2006
B.A., English, Princeton University, 1998

Mark Jerng joined the UC Davis Faculty in 2006. He teaches courses on Asian diasporic literature, U.S. ethnic literatures, critical race studies, 19th and 20th Century American literature, science fiction, and human rights. He is currently at work on a book manuscript titled Racial Worldmaking. This project analyzes the intersection of race and narrative practices in popular genres such as historical romance, fantasy, and science fiction, particularly the work of African American and Asian American writers within these genres. This book theorizes racialization not so much as it relates to identity formation but as a matter of world-construction. His first book, Claiming Others: Transracial Adoption and National Belonging, focuses on the ways in which shifting norms of race and kinship shape and naturalize our conceptions of personhood. It examines the phenomenon of transracial adoption from the 1820s to the present across Native American, African American, and Asian American contexts in fiction, memoir, legal history, and social work literature.  

Publication Spotlight:

Claiming Others: Transracial Adoption and National Belonging (University of Minnesota Press, 2010)

by Mark Jerng

"Claiming Others is a pioneering study that provides high-level theoretical grounding for a new field. Transracial/transnational interactions are basic to American adoption history from the early nineteenth century, he demonstrates; they didn't just begin in the 1950s. Jerng makes intellectual and aesthetic sense of writings by and about a new community of transracial and transnational adoptees as he discusses their new modes of personhood. This book will be essential to anyone attempting a theoretically informed discussion of adoption and culture."

—Marianne Novy, author of Reading Adoption: Family and Difference in Fiction and Drama

Selected Publications 

• "Adoptee" in Routledge Companion to Asian American and Pacific Islander Literature ed. Rachel Lee (Routledge, forthcoming).
  
• "A World of Difference: Samuel Delany's Dhalgren and the Protocols of Racial Reading,"  American Literature 83.2 (June 2011): 251-278.
  
• "Chang-rae Lee," Blackwell Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011)
• "Nowhere In Particular: Perceiving Race, Chang-rae Lee's Aloft, and the Question of Asian American Fiction," MFS: Modern Fiction Studies 56.1 (Spring 2010): 183-204.

• "Giving Form To Life: Cloning and Narrative Expectations of the Human," Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas 6.2 (June 2008):369-93.
• "The Character of Race: Adoption and Individuation in William Faulkner's Light in August and Charles Chesnutt's The Quarry," Arizona Quarterly 64.4 (Winter 2008): 69-102.
• Recognizing the Transracial Adoptee: Adoption Life Stories and Chang-rae Lee's A Gesture Life" in MELUS: Journal for the Society for the Study of Multi-Ethnic Literatures of the United States, volume 31, number 2 (Summer 2006).

Honors

• UC Center for New Racial Studies Research Grant, 2012-2013
• UC-Davis Faculty Development Award, 2009-10
• Davis Humanities Institute Fellow, 2007-08
• Harvard University Graduate Society Dissertation Completion Fellowship, 2005-2006
• Jacob K. Javits Fellowship, 1999-2004
• Honorary Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship, 1999
• Phi Betta Kappa, 1998

Courses

• Literature of the Asian Diaspora (undergraduate)
• Race and Reproduction (undergraduate)
• Introduction to Fiction (undergraduate)
• Literature and Social Crisis (undergraduate)
• Race, Difference, and Science Fiction (undergraduate)
  
• The Novel and Empathy (undergraduate)
• Critical Multiculturalism (graduate)
• Literature and Human Rights (graduate)
• Race in a Post-Race Era (graduate)
• Introduction to Graduate Studies (graduate)
  
• What is Ethnic Literature? (graduate)

Email: mcjerng@ucdavis.edu