Kun Huang joins the USC Society of Fellows from Cornell University, where she received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature in 2023. Working at the intersection of race theory, Chinese Studies, and global Blackness, her current research explores the textuality and technology of race-making in the literature and culture of global China. Her book project, Un/Translating Blackness: Global Racial Entanglements and Chinese Modernity, traces the fugitive movement of racial Blackness at the archival margins of 20th-century China. It shows that figures of Blackness – the enslaved, the revolutionary, the laborer, and the migrant of diasporic and continental Africa – infused articulations of Chinese modernity with tensions and contradictions of imperial visions and decolonial aspirations. Her research was funded by the American Council of Learned Societies, the Henry Luce Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University, and the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies.

Kun Huang has published on China-Africa literary connections during the Cold War (2022), Chinese diasporic anti-racist activism (2021), and the gendered and sexual structures of anti-Blackness in contemporary China (2020). She is also a Chinese translator of Toni Morrison’s (forthcoming) and Saidiya Hartman’s work (2020). Her scholarly and public-facing writings appear in the Journal of World Literature, positions politics, Wenxue (Literary Studies), On Our Times, and the Paper. She has been interviewed or quoted for expert opinion on race and global China by VICE Asia, Sixth Tone, Ifeng News, Initium Media, and Rest of World. Kun also organizes community-engaged anti-racist initiatives with Sinophone scholars, activists, writers, and artists.