Engkiong (E.K.) Tan, PhD

Inaugural Chair, Department of Communication
Associate Professor

Contact Dr. Tan

E.K. Tan is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies in the Department of English. He received his Ph.D. in Comparative and World Literature from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He specializes in the intersection of Anglophone and Sinophone literature, cinema, and culture,Asian American and diaspora studies, global Asias, Inter-Asia cultural studies, queer Asia, Southeast Asian literary and cultural studies, postcolonial theory, comparative literary and cultural studies, film and media theory.

He is the author ofRethinking Chineseness: Translational Sinophone Identities in the Nanyang Literary World. His essays have appeared in journals such as Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, Prism: Theory and Modern Chinese Literature, Sun Yat-Sen Journal of Humanities, Journal of Modern Chinese Literature, and Journal of Chinese Cinemas. He is currently working on two separate book projects. The first, tentatively titled “Queer Homecoming: Translocal Remapping of Sinophone Kinship,” examines the ways queer identities reshape kinship spaces across different Sinophone regions. The second, “Mandarinization and Its Impact on Sinophone Cultural Production: A Transcolonial Comparison of Ethnic China, Singapore and Taiwan,” analyzes how the process of Mandarinization has influenced cultural production within Sinophone communities in these locations.

See my current projects here: https://ektansinophone.wordpress.com/