Professor Chen teaches US literature, African American literature, and academic writing. He maintains an active research agenda in twentieth-century US literary and cultural studies, and he also serves as Director of the Writing Program.

Education

University of California, Irvine

· Ph.D. in English

· M.A. in English

University of California, Berkeley

· B.A. in English

Scholarly Publications

“Recovering the Worker in Meridel Le Sueur’s Worker Writers (1939/1982).” Co-authored with Maggie E. Morris Davis. Resources for American Literary Study. Volume 45, No. 1, 2024.

“Toni Morrison” exhibit panel for Notable Folklorists of Color: Expanding the Frames, 2022 online exhibit sponsored by the American Folklore Society and curated by Phyllis M. May-Machunda, Olivia Cadaval, and Sojin Kim.

“A Twenty-First-Century Teach-In for Inclusion and Justice: Co-Curriculum at the Intersections of Scholarship, Activism, and Civic Engagement.” Co-authored with Pat Somers. In Teaching and Learning for Social Justice and Equity in Higher Education: Co-Curricular Environments. Edited by Laura Parson and C. Casey Ozaki. Palgrave Macmillan. 2021.

“‘A People Do Not Throw Their Geniuses Away’: Edwidge Danticat’s ‘Kitchen Poet’ Literary Antecedents.” In The Bloomsbury Companion to Edwidge Danticat. Edited by Jana Evans Braziel and Nadège T. Clitandre. Bloomsbury Publishing. 2021.

“Teaching the American Protest Novel: Meridel Le Sueur’s The Girl and Its Pedagogy of Protest.” In Liberal Arts Education and the World: Inquiring into, Preparing for, and Living in the Real World through Core Texts. Selected Papers from the Eighteenth Annual Conference of the Association for Core Texts and Courses. Edited by Patrick Flynn, Alfred Martin, Anthony Wisniewski, and J. Scott Lee. 2019.

“Rotten Bananas, Hip Hop Heads, and the American Individual: Teaching Eddie Huang’s Memoir Fresh Off the Boat and Its Tropes of Literacy.” Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies. Vol. 8, 2017.

“Religious Difference and Multiculturalism in the Liberal Arts: Reading Eboo Patel Reading Core Texts and Courses.” In The Quest for Excellence: Liberal Arts, Sciences, and Core Texts. Selected

Proceedings from the Seventeenth Annual Conference of the Association for Core Texts and Courses. Edited by Dustin Gish, Chris Constas, and J. Scott Lee. Hamilton Books/Rowman & Littlefield. 2016.

“Narrating Diaspora in Edwidge Danticat’s Short-Story Cycle The Dew Breaker.” LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory. 25.3, 2014.

“Figures of Flight and Entrapment in Edwidge Danticat’s Krik? Krak!” The Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature: The Journal of the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association. 65.1, 2011.