Department of English

Choa Choi’s scholarship lies at multiple intersections of 20th-century and contemporary
American Literature, Multiethnic Literatures of the U.S., and Global Postcolonial Literatures. Choa’s research examines the literary and cultural representations of land, farming, and food vis-à-vis race, class, gender/sexuality, and labor. She is interested in how these representations interact with the form and genre of the novel particularly in the context of different stages of globalization and the ongoing configurations of the Cold War ideology. Her current project explores how the language of food production, consumption, and ecology is intertwined with the discourses of racial solidarity, conflicts, and the fuzziness in between. It probes into how this language concretizes, challenges, and/or re-imagines the relationship between the individual self and collective community as well as the demarcations between literary genres. By bringing disparate literary formations and interdisciplinary fields into relation under the collaborative of food, land, and the literary, her project engages critically with the institutional boundaries and silos that structure the study of English Literature as a discipline. Choa began her doctoral studies at Brown in 2022.