Degree: Began PhD program in Fall 2021
Concentration: 19th Century American Literature
Advisor: Antonio Tiongson Jr.

Debra Kue is a first-generation, Hmong American, third-year doctoral student in the English Department at Syracuse University, New York. Focusing on 19th-century American literature and Hmong studies, her current project dedicates itself to bridging these fields to trace how the creation and (re)production of Asian (il)legibility has and continues to shape the Hmong American subject and their literary productions within the United States. Her project also seeks to highlight the various methodologies and strategies through which the Hmong actively resist and destabilize Western logics in their communal praxes of mobility. Debra also participates within her field through creative writing. Her first book of poetry, short fiction and photography, Mother Tongue (2021) lyrically illustrates the challenges of growing up as a first-generation Hmong American woman within the United States and the tensions of navigating the web of transnational, gendered, racialized, cultural hybridity.

• B.A. English, Grand Valley State University
• M.A. English, Grand Valley State University