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

Mark Jerng joined the UC Davis Faculty in 2006. His research interests include race theory, Asian American literature, kinship studies, narrative and the novel, and intersections between psychoanalysis and literature.

He is completing a book manuscript, entitled Claiming Others: Transracial Adoption and the Reproduction of Personhood, which traces a genealogy of transracial adoption stories in American literature from the 1820's to the present. His current works-in-progress include an examination of the protocols of reading race across the intersection of popular genres and ethnic literatures; and an essay on how analyses of intercountry adoption rethink ethnic studies. He teaches courses on Asian American literature, critical multiculturalism, kinship and family, human rights narratives, and race theory.

Publications

• Claiming Others: Transracial Adoption and the Reproduction of Personhood (University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming 2010)
• "Nowhere In Particular: Perceiving Race, Chang-rae Lee's Aloft, and the Question of Asian American Fiction," MFS: Modern Fiction Studies (forthcoming March 2010)

• "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-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)
• Critical Multiculturalism (graduate)
• Literature and Human Rights (graduate)
• Race in a Post-Race Era (graduate)
• Introduction to Graduate Studies (graduate)
  

Email: mcjerng@ucdavis.edu