Writing

Peer-Reviewed Articles

“Racial Disintegration: Biomedical Futurity at the Environmental Limit.” American Literature 93.3 (September 2021): 497-523.

“Matériel Culture: The Militourist Aesthetic of Mary McCarthy’s Vietnam War Reportage.” Contemporary Literature 61.2 (Summer 2020): 162-193.

“The Posthuman Subject in/of Asian American Literature.” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature (February 2019): 1-23.

“Ecologies of Entanglement in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.” Journal of Asian American Studies 20.1 (February 2017): 95-117. 

“Creative Evolution: Narrative Symbiogenesis in Larissa Lari’s Salt Fish Girl.” Amerasia 42.2 (2016): 118-138.

“In Uniform Code: Catherine Barkley’s Wartime Nursing Service in A Farewell to Arms.” Twentieth-Century Literature 62.2 (Summer 2016): 197-222. 

“Hospice Comics: Representations of Patient and Family Experience of Illness and Death in Graphic Novels.” Co-authored with MK Czerwiec, R.N. Journal of Medical Humanities 38.2 (June 2017): 95-113.

Web/Other

“Solidarity in Incommensurability: Ethnic Studies and the Environmental Humanities.” with Carlos Alonso Nugent. American Quarterly 77.1 (March 2025): 133-144.

“Do Better Now.” ASAP/Journal 6.2 (May 2021 issue on “New Worlds of Speculation”): 303-307.

“‘feeling something as luminous’: an interview with Mei-mei Berssenbrugge and Teddy Yoshikami.” Tripwire: A Journal of Poetics 16 (2020): 192-212.

“On Resisting Extinction.” Verge: Studies in Global Asias 5.2 (Forgetting Wars): 99-106.

“Rematerializations of Race.” Lateral: Journal of the Cultural Studies Association 6.1 (May 2017). 

“The Synaptic Poetics of Kimiko Hahn’s Brain Fever.” Post45: Contemporaries series on Asian/American (Anti-)Bodies (December 2016). 

“Response to Kyle Whyte Lecture ‘Living Our Ancestors’ Dystopia: Indigenous Peoples, Conservation, and the Anthropocene.’” Penn State Institute for the Arts & Humanities, Mellon Foundation Initiative, “The Boundaries of the Human in the Age of the Life Sciences” (July 2016).  

“My Mother Had a Stroke When I was Eleven” (comic) in Graphic Medicine Manifesto by MK Czerwiec, Ian Williams, Susan Squier, Michael J. Green, Kimberly R. Myers, and Scott T. Smith. University Park: Penn State University Press (2015).

Racial Beings

A book-length study about scientific discourse and experimental literary form in Asian American literature, 1965-present.

https://www.dukeupress.edu/racial-beings | 30% off code: E26HUANG

In Racial Beings, Michelle N. Huang brings a feminist new materialist lens to bear on contemporary Asian American literature’s innovative play with discourses of science and technology. She argues that emerging from these works is a “molecular aesthetics”—formal experimentation that diminishes the boundaries of the human—which challenge the perception of racial identity as a trait of an individual human. Instead, molecular aesthetics reveals how race permeates the matter of the world. Reading works by authors such as Ruth Ozeki, Larissa Lai, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, and Julie Otsuka through the language of scientific discourses like quantum physics, genetic engineering, and elemental chemistry, Huang develops a synthetic reading practice which shows both that the nexus of race and science is not reducible to scientific racism and that science can provide an unlikely creative reservoir for Asian American writers and artists which allows us to imagine alternative ways of understanding racial being beyond the limits of the human individual.

Work from this book project has appeared in the Journal of Asian American Studies and Amerasia.

&etc.

I am also at work on pieces of my second manucsript, The Secret Life of Race, regarding biomedicine and Asian American racial formation. Work from this project has appeared in American Literature.

A twenty-four-minute film essay I created, INHUMAN FIGURES: Robots, Clones, and Aliens, can be viewed online at the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center.