David L. Eng

David Eng’s areas of specialization include American literature, Asian American studies, Asian diaspora, psychoanalysis, critical race theory, queer studies, gender studies, and visual culture. Eng also teaches in the School’s programs in comparative literature and literary theory and in Asian American studies.

Eng is author of The Feeling of Kinship: Queer Liberalism and the Racialization of Intimacy and Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America, and coauthor with Shinhee Han of Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation. He is coeditor with David Kazanjian of Loss: The Politics of Mourning and with Alice Y. Hom of Q&A: Queer in Asian America, winner of a Lambda Literary Award and Association of Asian American Studies Book Award. Eng is currently working on a history of reparations and human rights in Cold War Asia.

At Penn, Eng is a founding convener of the Faculty Working Group on Race and Empire Studies as well as a member of the Faculty Advisory Board of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies. He is on the governing council of the American Council of Learned Societies and a member of the editorial boards of Social Text and GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, among others. He is a former member of the Board of Directors of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop and a former chair of the Board of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies in New York City.

He is the recipient of research fellowships from the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and the Mellon Foundation, among others.

Eng received his undergraduate degree in English from Columbia University and his Ph.D. in comparative literature from the University of California at Berkeley. He joined Penn in 2007.