Biography

Janet Kong-Chow specializes in interdisciplinary theories of racial capitalism, built and natural environments, postcolonialism, Black Studies, and Asian diasporic cultures. She is currently completing two book projects, Securing the Crisis: Race and the Poetics of Risk, and Curating Aesthetics of Race: Cultures of the Modern American Archive. Her research has appeared and is forthcoming in ASAP/Journal, American Studies, Interplay: Journal of Languages, Linguistics and Literature, and Journal of the Penn Manuscript Collective.

Professor Kong-Chow teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on the Black Atlantic, race and ethnic studies, environmental humanities, literary and critical theory, and U.S. imperialism. 

She received her Ph.D. from Princeton University, where she was also a Teaching Fellow (‘19) at Camden County College through the Community College Teaching Partnership. Before joining URI, she was a Rising Scholars Postdoctoral Fellow in American Studies and English at the University of Virginia, as part of a Race, Place and Equity grant from the Mellon Foundation.

 Research

Black Studies, Critical Theory, Postcolonialism, American Studies, Hemispheric and Transnational Literatures, Environmental Humanities, Archival Theory

Education

Ph.D., Princeton University

M.A., Princeton University

B.A., University of Pennsylvania