Biography
Kun Huang joined Holy Cross in 2025, after earning her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Cornell University and serving as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at the University of Southern California. Her research focuses on transnational racial formations, global Afro-Asian connections, and Asian literary and media cultures. Her current research project examines the textuality and technology of race-making in 20th-century China by tracing figures of Blackness in Sinophone media archives.
As a faculty member of CRES, Professor Huang is interested in anti-racism not only as a scholarly pursuit, but also as public-facing work, creative energies, and community-building practices. Her courses at Holy Cross invite students to question dominant ideas of culture, history, and the human by attending to racialized experiences of global modernity.
As a Cantonese native, she enjoys good food, genre films, and tabletop games in her spare time.
Publications
- “Race in Translation, Translation as Anti-Racist Praxis: Rethinking Blackness and Global China” (2025, Journal of Asian Studies, 84:3)
- “Reconfiguring Racial Capitalism: A Conversation with Mingwei Huang” (2025, Global China Pulse, 4:1)
- “Afro-Asian Parallax: The Harlem Renaissance, Literary Blackness, and Chinese Left-Wing Translations” (2024, Made in China Journal, 9:1)
- 他者的起源 (Book-length translation of Toni Morrison’s The Origin of Others, Playing in the Dark, Nobel Lecture, and Recitatif in Chinese, 2023, Thinkingdom)
- “Translated Solidarity: Lumumba’s Textual Afterlives and the Poetics of African Decolonization in Maoist China” (2022, Journal of World Literature, 7:4)
- “‘Anti-Blackness’ in Chinese Racial-Nationalism: Sex/Gender, Reproduction, and Metaphors of Pathology” (2020, positions politics)