Kristina Huang

I specialize in African diasporic literatures from the vantage point of the eighteenth-century transatlantic world. My research and teaching engage with methods from Caribbean Studies, Black Studies, Cultural Studies, and social movement histories through the Black Atlantic world. As an interdisciplinary scholar and educator, my work centers on historical representations of subaltern, enslaved, and minoritized lives and how those representations inform critical theory, literary study, and political practice.

I have also written a range of short essays (from reviews of academic work and contemporary fiction to short-form pieces about race and the university) alongside interviews with artists on how their research on Caribbean History and Black History in Britain informs their creative practices. These essays have appeared in various online and print publications: Small Axe Salon, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Asian American Writers’ Workshop, and the Lincoln Center Theatre Blog, Social Text Online, Warscapes, Restoration and 18th Century Theatre Research, Eighteenth-Century Studies, Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal.

Research and Teaching Interests

Anglophone literature of the long eighteenth century, African Diaspora Studies, Caribbean Studies, Cultural Studies, slavery and abolition

Degrees and Institutions

• PhD, English, The Graduate Center of the City University of New York
• BA, English and Political Science, Hunter College of the City University of New York

Books in Progress

Black Life Unbound (book manuscript)

The Cambridge Companion to Ignatius Sancho (co-edited with Nicole Aljoe)

Peer Reviewed Publications

“Along and Against the Grain: Close-reading The History of Mary Prince.” ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830. 13:1 (2023).

“Beyond the Nation, Traces of Anne Sancho.” Studies in Romanticism. 61:1 (2022): 101-11.

“‘Ameliorating the Situation’ of Empire: Slavery and Abolition in The Woman of Colour.” Eighteenth-Century Fiction. 34: 2 (2022): 167-186.

“Carnivalizing Imoinda’s Silence.” Eighteenth-Century Fiction. 34:1 (2021): 61–86.

“Blackness and Lines of Beauty in the Eighteenth-Century Anglophone Atlantic World.” African and Black Diaspora: An International Journal. Special issue on “Creolization and Trans Atlantic Blackness: The Visual and Material Cultures of Slavery.” 12:3 (2019): 271-286.

Teaching

Courses
ENG 182: Satire and the Politics of Laughter
ENG 242: Abolition and Literature
ENG 245: Plot and Plantation: The Material of Resistance and the Novel
ENG 334: Ignatius Sancho’s London
ENG 375: Diasporic Crossings and Storytelling
ENG 461: Black Life and Thought in the Long Eighteenth Century
ENG 805: Black Life and Thought in the Long Eighteenth Century (graduate course)

Teaching Awards
Distinguished Honors Faculty Honorary Mention (2020)
UW Hilldale Undergraduate/Faculty Research Fellow, with Veronica Hayes (2020)
Madison Teaching and Learning Excellence (MTLE) Fellow (2019-2020)
Honored Instructor Award, University Housing Academic Initiatives (2018, 2019)

Collaborations

Co-organizer of the Borghesi-Mellon Workshop “Abolition and Refuge: Toward Community-Campus Conversations” (2021-2024)