Amy R. Wong, PhD

Amy teaches in a variety of areas, from literature and writing to Core, Honors, and Service-Learning courses. Her courses have covered such topics as nineteenth-century British literature, children’s literature, dystopian science fiction, literary monstrosity, critical media studies, reading popular media, the study of film and drama, fiction and poetry, and effective communication.

Education

UCLA, PhD, English

Long Island University, MSc, Education

Harvard College, BA, History and Literature

Research Interests

Amy’s areas of research and expertise include Victorian literature and culture, media theory, critical race studies, postcolonial and anticolonial approaches to literature, Asian diasporic literature and psychoanalysis. Her book, Refiguring Speech: Late Victorian Fictions of Empire and the Poetics of Talk (Stanford University Press, 2023), examines how “failures” of speech in late Victorian stories of empire inadvertently disrupt seemingly self-evident truths about speech: that words originate in and belong to single bodies. By turning attention to an anticolonial poetics of “un-self possessed” speech, the book posits talk as an alternate model of communication that leaves behind colonialist proprietary logic, functioning instead through communal ownership and embeddedness within the material, social world.

Amy is also a co-editor of the recent special issue, “Undisciplining Victorian Studies” in Victorian Studies (with Ronjaunee Chatterjee and Alicia Mireles Christoff, 2020). She is currently working on another book on intersections between recent Asian diaspora history and psychoanalysis. Her other publications may be found or are forthcoming in Mediations, Narrative, Victorian Review, Victorian Literature and Culture, Modern Philology, SEL: Studies in English Literature, Studies in the Novel, Literature Compass, ASAP Journal, Post45, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and Public Books.