Karen Tongson

b. 1973

Biography

Karen Tongson is a cultural critic, writer and queer studies scholar. She is the author of Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries (New York University Press, 2011), co-editor of the book series, Postmillennial Pop (with Henry Jenkins) at NYU Press, and co-editor-in-chief of The Journal of Popular Music Studies (with Gustavus Stadler). She is also the events editor for the journal American Quarterly. Born in Manila, Philippines on August 23, 1973 to one of the nation's founding families of Latin jazz—the Katindig family—Tongson immigrated to the US in the early 1980s and became a U.S. citizen in 1989.

Tongson is currently an Associate Professor of English and Gender Studies at the University of Southern California, where she teaches courses on gender and sexuality, popular culture, comparative minority discourse, suburban sexualities, empires and regionalism, California cultures, queer studies, and nineteenth-century British literature.

She received her B.A. in English from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1995, and her Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Berkeley in 2003. After receiving her Ph.D., Tongson held a University of California President's Postdoctoral fellowship in Literature at the University of California, San Diego (2003-2005), and a postdoctoral fellowship with the University of California Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI) at the University of California, Irvine (2004-2005). From 2007-2010, Tongson collaborated on the blog OH! INDUSTRY with other co-founders Christine Bacareza Balance and Alexandra Vazquez. Oh! Industry has been acknowledged as a groundbreaking scholarly blog about popular culture, race and sexuality.

Tongson's work has appeared in a range of print and online publications, including Social Text, GLQ, Nineteenth-Century Literature, You Offend Me, You Offend My Family, Social Text: Periscope, In Media Res, and anthologies such as Pop When the World Falls Apart (Duke UP, 2012), Queering the Popular Pitch (Routledge, 2006), and The Blackwell Companion to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer Studies (2007), as well as in the French magazine, les Incrockuptibles.