Haivan Hoang

Haivan Hoang joined the faculty at UMass Amherst in 2004, and she holds a PhD in English from Ohio State University, MA in English from California State University at Hayward, and BA from UC Berkeley. Her research and teaching interests center on literacy studies, critical race theory, Asian American rhetorics, qualitative research methodologies in writing studies, and postsecondary teaching of writing.

Professor Hoang is the author of Writing against Racial Injury: The Politics of Asian American Student Rhetoric (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015), which broadly examines the impact of U.S. racial legacies on who gets to be a writer and, more specifically, presents an archive-based and an ethnographic case study of Asian American activism for language and literacy in post-1960s California. She is currently conducting a qualitative study on the ways in which race becomes salient for students and instructors in discipline-specific writing courses.

She is committed to postsecondary writing education and has held several roles in the university’s Writing Program: Director of the Writing Center (2008-10), Director of the Writing Program (2011-16), and Associate Director of the Junior Year Writing Program (2019-present). She was awarded the College of Humanities & Fine Arts Outstanding Teaching Award 2010 as well as the University of Massachusetts Amherst Manning Prize for Excellence in Teaching in 2017.