Josh Takano Chambers-Letson

Assistant Professor
350G McMicken Hall
513-556-3207

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Education

Ph.D., New York University, NY, NY, 2009 (Performance Studies).

MA, New York University, NY, NY, 2004 (Performance Studies).

LBA, Eugene Lang College, New School University, NY, NY, 2002 (Liberal Arts).

Professional Summary

Josh Takano Chambers-Letson is Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature and Affiliate Faculty in the Department of Womens, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Cincinnati. He received his Ph.D in Performance Studies from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts in 2009. From 2009-2010 he was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for the Humanities of Wesleyan University studying the theme of war. His book manuscript, A Race So Different: The Making of Asian Americans in Performance and Law, studies the relationship of law and performance to the production of modern and contemporary Asian American subjectivity. This project argues that Asian Americans have been produced as subject to a state of racial exception, simultaneously included in and excluded from the law's privileges and protections; shuttling between inclusion and exclusion from the state. He is also beginning a second book project that articulates Asian America less as a racial or cultural identity, arguing instead for a concept of Asian America as a form of political performance manifest in a set of historically and socially contingent practices that are relational to the history and legacies of Asian American racialization. In the fall of 2011 he will join the faculty of the department of Performance Studies at Northwestern University. 

Research Interests

Asian American Studies, Performance Studies, Political Theory, Law, Marxism, Queer and Feminist Theory

Peer Reviewed Publications

(2010). Contracting Justice: The Viral Strategy of Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts, 51(4), 559-587

(2010). Embodying Justice: The Making of Justice Sonia Sotomayor. Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, 20(2), 149-172.

(2006). Introduction: Special Issue on Reparations. Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, 16(2), 169-190

Non-Fiction

(2008). The Accomplice: Memories from an Illicit Childhood. Topic Magazine: Special Issue on Escape, Vol 11: 60-62, 68-71.

Other Publications

(2007). The Queer Politics of Failure: Nao Bustamante's Hero. TDR: The Drama Review, T195, 174-181

In Press

(forthcoming 2011). North American Field Guide: Kenneth Pietrobono's Queer Landscape of US Empire. Women and Performance: a journal of feminist theory, Vol 20, 1:13-32.

(2011, forthcoming Winter). "A Race So Different": Staging Racial Exception in Ping Chong's Chinoiserie. MELUS. Special Issue on Asian American Performance.

Post Graduate Training & Education

2009-2010, Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, Center for the Humanities, Wesleyan University, Connecticut.

Courses Taught

15-ENGL-234 CONTEMP LIT:DRAMA.

15-ENGL-333 CONT AMER DRAMA.

15-ENGC-240 TOPICS IN DRAMA .

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