Betsy Huang is Professor of English at Clark University. She served as Associate Provost and Dean of the College from 2019 to 2024, as Director of the Center for Gender, Race, and Area Studies from 2017 to 2019, and was Clark’s inaugural Chief Officer of Diversity and Inclusion from 2013 to 2016. She held the Andrea B. and Peter D. Klein ’64 Distinguished Professorship from 2018 to 2023.
Dr. Huang came to Clark in 2003 when she joined the English Department as its first specialist in U.S. multi-ethnic literature. She teaches and researches in the overlapping spheres of ethnic American and Asian American literature, genre fiction and theory with an emphasis on science fiction, and critical ethnic studies. Her teaching focuses on literatures on the margins: stories of people living and writing in spaces of cultural and historical invisibility. She is a two-time winner of Clark University’s Outstanding Teacher of the Year Award.
Courses taught by Dr. Huang include Ethnic America: Literature, Theory, Politics; Fictions of Asian America; Studies in Contemporary Literature: Speculative Fiction; Science Fiction and the Mind of the Other (with Dr. Scott Hendricks, Philosophy); Race, Genre, and Autobiography (with Dr. Shelly Tenenbaum, Sociology); Speculative fiction: Ecologies and Technologies; and the English Senior Capstone.
Dr. Huang has published four books — a monograph, Contesting Genres in Contemporary Asian American Fiction (Palgrave, 2010), and three co-edited essay collections: Asian American Literature in Transition: 1996-2020 (Cambridge University Press, 2021); Diversity and Inclusion in Higher Education and Societal Contexts (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018); and Techno-Orientalism: Imagining Asia in Speculative Fiction, History, and Media (Rutgers UP, 2015). She and her co-editors recently completed Techno-Orientalism 2.0: New Intersections and Interventions, a follow-up volume to the first Techno-Orientalism anthology that is forthcoming in 2025, on the ten-year anniversary of the publication of the first volume. Her work has appeared in The Cambridge Companion to American Horror, The Cambridge Companion to Asian American Literature, Journal of Asian American Studies, and MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literatures of the U.S..