Jennifer Cho

Jennifer is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the English department. Her research and teaching interests center on twentieth-century and contemporary American literature (with a focus on Asian American literature), ethnic studies, writing pedagogy, psychoanalysis, and theories of trauma, memory, and affect.

Currently, her work engages with expressions of grief and shame in Asian American texts, linking these emotions to the process of identifying, feeling, and remembering as Asian Americans. Jennifer is working on a book that considers these residual feelings in light of the enduring implications of U.S. imperial histories in the Asia Pacific. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée and Lee Isaac Chung’s Minari are just a small sampling of the texts she examines. She thinks about the ways in which narratives of Asian/American belonging and assimilation in the U.S. mirror recovery narratives of trauma, sharing in their logic of overcoming and thus forgetting those histories that are incompatible with American exceptionalism. 

Jennifer is also excited about the interplay between writing pedagogy and social literacy. She searches for creative methods – both in theory and in praxis – for students to exercise their capabilities for empathy, diversity awareness, and social activism through their own writing and study of literature. Her next project looks to amplify these connections, using Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower as a foundational text.