You are here: Home People Directory Mark Jerng
Mark Jerng
Document Actions

Mark Jerng

  • Associate Professor of English
272 Voorhies
Office Hours: W 2-3, TH 3-4 & by appointment
Phone: (530) 752-1696

Biography:

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 cover

 

"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 


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


Powered by Plone CMS, the Open Source Content Management System

This site conforms to the following standards:

Personal tools