Degree: Began PhD program in 2019
Concentration: 20th and 21st-century American Literature
Advisor: Antonio T. Tiongson Jr.

Sue-jin is a sixth-year PhD candidate and University Fellow whose research focuses on Black and Asian American literature and cultural productions in the long 20th century (post-Reconstruction to the Present). Her dissertation, "Afro-Asian Intimacies: Chimeric Bodies, Spaces, and Forms," engages Afro-Asian critique as a mode of critical interpretation (rather than solely an identity category) that interrogates and problematizes the pretensions of citizenship, empire, and American exceptionalism. Her research explores how US military intervention produces particular forms of generational trauma and necessitates the formation of alternative kinship structures within this historical context. The manifestations of these kinship structures complicate conventional understandings of these histories as linear or discrete and open alternative means of belonging outside of capitalist, heteronormative, and nation state-based frameworks.

B.A. English and Spanish, Texas Christian University
M.Phil. English, Syracuse University
Certificate of Advanced Study, Women’s and Gender Studies, Syracuse University