Erin Y. Huang

Erin Y. Huang received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and a certificate of advanced Feminist Studies in Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of California, Irvine. She is a scholar of transregional Asian studies, specializing in the aesthetics and politics of Chinese, Sinophone (Hong Kong and Taiwan), and Sino-American visual and literary cultures produced under the condition of war, imperialism, and economic globalization in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Distinct from the conventional nation-centered approach, Huang’s work has been known for its focus on geopolitics and transregional relations that draw attention to the study of borderlands, frontiers, and experimental zones of exception. 

She is the author of Urban Horror: Neoliberal Post-Socialism and the Limits of Visibility (Duke University Press, 2020), a work of affect theory, film studies, and post-Cold War China and Sinophone Asia. Overall, the book draws attention to the unique transregional urban transformations taking place in post-socialist China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Highlighting the experimental practice of “zoning” in China, including Special Economic Zones (SEZ) and Special Administrative Regions (SAR) that are used to create economic and political integration in an imagined “Greater China,” Urban Horror examines visual cultures that emerged alongside the spatial practices of zoning following the presumed end of the Cold War. The book transforms the conventional approach to horror as a genre and refocuses on “urban horror” as the name of a spectrum of affects and feelings that exceed the norm of comprehension. It is the first study of Chinese and Sinophone film and media culture to focus on the speculative and affective powers of moving images and their ability to rehearse and generate new aesthetics of resistance specific to the perpetual and suspended condition of being “post-” to “socialism,” “capitalism,” and “war.” 

She is currently working on her second book, tentatively titled Ocean Worlds: Transpacific Worldmaking Across Sensorial Oceans. Expanding the study of military and surveillance visual culture, the project focuses on the materiality and aesthetic representation of technologically enhanced oceans, islands, and liquid environments across the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea: a hypervisible, hypermediated, and high-risk maritime space that links the unfinished First Cold War and the speculated New Cold War among the United States, China, Taiwan, and beyond. To do so, the project illustrates and demystifies the American and Chinese dreams of infrastructural “ocean worlds,” including the American “island chain” along the western Pacific and the militarized Taiwan Strait, the recent Chinese Maritime Silk Road Initiative, and the construction of mega-scale artificial islands in the South China Sea. This project is situated in the emergent field of de-imperial ocean and island studies, with intersection to the study of race, gender, indigeneity, militarism, imperialism, and environmentalism. Highlighting “inter-imperialism” in the ocean space—the coupling of multiple empires in the formation of transoceanic militarism to create a war that will never end, but may not fully arrive, this project builds and preserves a multi-sensory “ocean archive,” wherein the workings of imperial thinking and de-imperial cultural techniques are excavated through nuanced textual readings. 

Prior to joining the University of Toronto, she was Assistant Professor of East Asian Studies and Comparative Literature at Princeton University and Visiting Assistant Professor at New York University.