About

Chris A. Eng is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Maryland, College Park. Primarily situated at the intersections of Asian American cultural studies and queer of color critique, his writings and teaching engage the fields of critical ethnic studies, performance studies, and post45 literatures alongside theorizations of affect, diaspora, and empire.

His first monograph, Extravagant Camp: The Queer Abjection of Asian America was published by NYU Press in the Sexual Cultures series (February 2025). In it, Chris illuminates Asian American camp as a prevalent yet underappreciated cultural strategy for contesting accounts of racialization that overly rely on terms of abjection. Extravagant Camp studies how Asian American camp takes on queerness as a resource to enliven modes of joy, beauty, and pleasure within structures of constraint, revealing the types of power camp retrieves for racialized communities in the face of abjection. 

Aside from the book, Chris’s writings have appeared in American Quarterly, GLQ, Journal of Asian American Studies, Lateral, MELUS, and Theatre Journal. His 2020 essay on queer shame in Justin Chin’s poetry received an honorable mention for the Crompton-Noll Article Prize, awarded jointly by the GLQ Caucus of the Modern Language Association and Queer/Trans Caucus of the American Studies Association. Additionally, his essays have appeared in two edited collections: Asian American Literature in Transition Volume Three, 1965-1996 (Cambridge University Press), which received an American Library Association’s 2022 Choice “Outstanding Academic Title” award, and Q&A: Voices from Queer Asian North America (Temple University Press), a 2022 Lambda Literary Award Finalist for LGBTQ Anthology.

Nationally, Chris has served on the Executive Committee of the Asian American Literature forum of the Modern Language Association, the Minority Scholars Committee of the American Studies Association, and as chair of the Queer Studies section at the Association for Asian American Studies. His work has been recognized by the Institute for Citizens & Scholars through a Career Enhancement Fellowship and by the WashU in St. Louis Graduate Student Senate through an Outstanding Faculty Mentor Award. In 2023, Chris received the Early Career Achievement Award from the Association for Asian American Studies.

Born and raised in Queens, NY, Chris received his undergraduate and doctoral training at the City University of New York. At the Macaulay Honors College at Hunter, he co-founded the student organization CRAASH and was a Mellon-Mays Undergraduate Fellow. Chris went on to receive his Ph.D. in English from The Graduate Center, CUNY, where he spearheaded such initiatives as the Mentoring Future Faculty of Color Project. After graduating, he was a Postdoc in Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Prior to UMD, Chris taught at Syracuse University and Washington University in St. Louis.