Jennifer Ho

The daughter of a refugee father from China and an immigrant mother from Jamaica, whose parents themselves were immigrants from Hong Kong, Jennifer Ho is the director of the Center for Humanities & the Arts at the University of Colorado Boulder, where she specializes in Asian American literary and cultural studies and Critical Race Theory. She is past president of the Association for Asian American Studies (2020-2022), the editor of four essay collections, most recently Global Anti-Asian Racism (Columbia UP 2024), the author of three scholarly monographs, including Racial Ambiguity in Asian American Culture (Rutgers UP 2015), which won the best monograph award from the South Atlantic Modern Language Association in 2017, and a number of essays and articles, both research oriented and public facing (a sampling of which is also on this webpage). In addition to her academic work, Ho is active in community engagement around issues of race and intersectionality.

Selected Interviews

“The Tavis Smiley Show” KBLA 1580 am Talk Radio. (May 2023).

“Dr. Jennifer Ho on Assimilating America’s Culture of Gun Violence, Toxic Masculinity, and White Supremacy,” Asian America: the Ken Fong Podcast, (January 2023).

“A History of Anti-Asian Racism,” It’s Been a Minute with Sam Sanders, NPR. (March 2021).

AMA Journal of Ethics – Ethics Talk: “Spread of Anti-Asian Racism and Xenophobia During COVID-19 Pandemic” (June 2020).

Brown University – Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity, “Racial Ambiguity in Asian American Culture” (January 2018).

Splendid Table “Food plays a crucial role in how I identify as Chinese Jamaican” (March 2015).

WUNC – The State of Things “No F****** Pink Ribbons! Is it Time for the Bow to Go?” (January 2014).

Selected Publications

Books

Global Anti-Asian Racism. Editor. Columbia University Press, 2024.

Teaching Asian North American Literature. Co-editor with Jenny Wills (University of Winnipeg). Modern Language Association Press, 2022.

Narrative, Race, and Ethnicity in the United States. Edited along with James Donahue (SUNY Potsdam) & Shaun Morgan (Tennessee Wesleyan College). Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2017.

Understanding Gish Jen. Columbia, SC: The University of South Carolina Press, 2015.

Racial Ambiguity in Asian American Culture. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2015.

Consumption and Identity in Asian American Coming-of-Age Novels. New York: Routledge Press, 2005.

Articles/Book Chapters

“The Necessity of Racial Literacy in a Mixed Race America,” essay for Race in the Multiethnic Literature Classroom, eds. Cristina Stanciu and Gary Totten (University of Illinois 2024) 15-31.

“How to Center Anti-Racism and Intersectionality in Public Humanities Work,” The Routledge Companion to Publicly Engaged Humanities Scholarship, eds. Daniel Fisher-Livine and Michelle May-Curry (Routledge 2024), 254-266.

“The State of Mixed Race Asian American Literature.” Asian American Literature in Transition, Volume Four (1995-present), eds. Betsy Huang and Victor Mendoza. Cambridge University Press, 2021, 294-310.

“Anti-Asian Racism, Black Lives Matter, and COVID-19” Japan Forum.  33:1, 148-159 (2021).

“Claiming Dixie?” Oxford American. Spring 2019. 12-15. 

“The Accidental Academic or How to Succeed in Academia through Failure and Doubt.” Staging Women’s Lives in Academia, eds. Michelle Masse and Nan Bauer-Maglin. State University of New York Press, 2017. 29-39.

“Identity.” Keywords in Asian American Studies, eds. K. Scott Wong, Linda Vo, and Cathy Schlund-Vials.  New York: New York University Press, 2015. 125-127.

In-Progress (single author)

“I Am Not My Breast Cancer: Why I Hate Those F****** Pink Ribbons and Other Observations on My Post-Cancer Life” (book manuscript/memoir).

“Three Continents, Five Countries, One Family: My Chinese Jamaican Family’s Transnational and Transpacific Story” (book manuscript/family biography).