Approaching Global Asias 3rd Annual Lecture by Dr. Tina Chen

The Approaching Global Asias Collaborative proudly presents our 3rd Annual Lecture featuring Dr. Tina Chen (English & Asian American Studies, Pennsylvania State University) entitled "Alien Form: Global Asias and Other Speculative Genres of Academic Labor". 

Lecture Abstract: This talk examines how academia cultivates, manages, and rewards academic labor and argues that to develop more capacious forms of scholarly praxis, we need to embrace teaching, research, and service (TRS) as speculative genres. Examining these issues within the context of the multidisciplinary field of Global Asias, I propose alien form as a paradigm that makes visible how academic labor's incongruency with existing determinative definitions of TRS can open up new possibilities for remaking the institutional imperatives of the academic humanities. Like my forthcoming monograph (Alien Forms and Minor Genres, Duke UP 2026), I’ll be experimenting with form and structure and looking forward to collaborating with colleagues on how to harness the generative energies of generic friction in reimagining scholarly work.

Lecturer Bio: Tina Chen is interested in speculative fictions, the imaginable ageography of Global Asias, and the genres of academic labor. She was initially trained as an Asian Americanist but over the last decade, her work has focused on exploring the possibilities and limits of theorizing “Global Asias” as an epistemology and method that simultaneously recognizes and challenges the distinctions separating area studies and diaspora studies. As the founding editor of Verge: Studies in Global Asias, an award-winning journal that brings Asian studies, Asian American studies, and Asian diaspora studies into non-aligned relation, and the founding director of the PSU Global Asias Initiative, she is committed to developing platforms that encourage multidisciplinary engagement and the cross-pollination of knowledge across disciplinary and field boundaries. Chen recently published Global Asias: Tactics & Theories (2025), a collaborative project that serves as the inaugural volume of a new Global Asias book series with the University of Hawai’i Press, and her latest project, Alien Forms and Minor Genres: A Speculative Handbook of Academic Labor, is forthcoming from Duke UP in Fall 2026.

This event is cosponsored by: The Center for Race, Indigeneity, Disability, Gender, & Sexuality Studies (RIDGS), the Department of Asian & Middle Eastern Studies (AMES), the Institute for Advanced Studies (IAS), the Department of Cultural Studies & Comparative Literature (CSCL), the Department of English, the CLA Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Office, the Immigration History Research Center (IHRC), and the Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Global Change (ICGC)