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Contact Information:
491 Bartlett Hall
UMass
Amherst, MA 0l003
p: 413-545-2979
f: 413-545-3880
hgphan@english.umass.edu
Last Modified: August 2006
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Assistant Professor
Hoang Gia Phan received his B.A. in English from the University of Chicago (1998), and his Ph.D. in Literature from the University of California at Berkeley (2004).
He has taught as an Assistant Professor at the University at Albany , SUNY (2004-2006) and as the Gaius Charles Bolin Fellow at Williams College (2003-2004). His fields of research include eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American literature, African American literature, Asian American Literature, Marxism, Postcolonial Theory, and Legal-Literary Studies.
His book project, Subjects of Citizenship: Literature and the Labors of Law , analyzes the narrative forms of legal and literary texts in order to trace the cultural production of the citizen as the universalized, ideal form of personhood and subjectivity in the U.S. The study focuses upon citizenship as that mediating form through which slavery law, whose
avowed object is unfree labor, and labor law, whose avowed object is free labor, articulate both their distinct and their shared representations of personhood. Employing a critical genealogy of the emergence and the crises of the modern citizen-form as its organizing thread, the book argues that in the age of Emancipation the range of
rights and privileges conceived as constitutive of freedom became identified with the citizen; and that freedom became understood as possible solely in and through citizenship.
Publications
“Free Subjects: Black Civic Identity and the Invention of the Asiatic,”
Law and Humanities (Fall 2003)
“‘A race so different': Chinese Exclusion, the Slaughterhouse Cases , and Plessy v. Ferguson ,” Labor History Volume 45, no. 2 (May 2004)
“Imagined Territories: Wong Kim Ark and Accidental Citizenship, ” Genre vol. 30, no. 1 ( forthcoming Spring 2007
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