Areas of Interest: Minority U.S. Literature and Culture, Transnational American Studies, Ecocriticism, Comparative Racialization, Postcolonial Literature and Theory, Ethnic Studies
Contact Information
Email: eky@umbc.edu
Office: PAHB 310
Office Number: 410-455-2323
Education
Ph.D. in English, University of Maryland, College Park
M.A. in Humanities, concentration in Literary Studies, University of Texas at Dallas
B.A. in English, Johns Hopkins University
Biography
Emily Yoon is Assistant Professor of English and former UMBC Postdoctoral Fellow for Faculty Diversity. Her research investigates transnational formations of race as represented in minority U.S. literatures, expanding the scope of American literature and American understandings of race from the national to the global. Her book-in-progress explores how minority characters respond to the environment, both as impacted by climate change and as a precarious setting that buttresses social domination by drawing attention to the interlocking global realities of colonialism, capitalism, and environmental crisis that results from the contact between human and ocean. This project brings together ecocriticism’s attentiveness to the environment and the ocean as a site of critical possibility with important work in ethnic studies on the ocean as a physical site of racialized labor and violence as well as a theoretical mechanism for thinking through racialized ontology through a multidisciplinary approach to minority literatures.