Julia Chang

Overview

Julia Chang is Associate Professor of Hispanic Studies at Cornell University and is affiliated with the Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program and the Southeast Asia Program. Her interdisciplinary research and teaching span nineteenth-century Spanish literature (with a focus on the realist novel), contemporary Spanish non-fiction and visual art (especially works by racialized writers and artists), and Philippine literature in Spanish. Her work also engages with feminist and queer theory, histories of racial formation, disability studies, and game studies.

Chang’s first book, Blood Novels: Gender, Caste, and Race in Spanish Realism (University of Toronto Press, 2022), was awarded the inaugural “Harriet S. Turner Beca” by the Asociación Internacional de Galdosistas.

Chang is the recipient of the 2021 Stephen and Margery Russell Distinguished Teaching Award. From 2022 to 2024, she was a fellow in the CIVIC Research Collaborative in Media Studies, working on the theme “Interactive Media and Games.” Before joining Cornell, she held a faculty position at Brown University. She currently serves as a member of the research collective TRECE (Taller de Raza, Etnicidad y Ciudadanía en España) and is part of the Editorial Collective of the Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies.

 

RECENT COURSES

Research Focus

Modern and Contemporary Peninsular Literature and Culture

Philippine Literature in Spanish

Race and Anti-Racism 

Feminist and Queer Theory 

Disability Studies

Game Studies 

Publications

• “Realism and Race in the Literature of the Global Hispanic Empire,” in Katherine Bowers, and Margarita Vaysman (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Global Realisms, Oxford Academic, 2024.
• “‘Linaje’s Geneanolgy,’”Diacritics: A Review of Contemporary Criticisim, vol. 51, no.1, 2024. pp. 102-16.
• "Petrified: Debilitating Bodies in Benito Pérez Galdós’s Marianela (1879)." Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies, vol. 18 no. 1, 2024, p. 35-51. Project MUSE muse.jhu.edu/article/918884.
• “Spectacular Bodies: Pregnancy, Racism, and the Code of Silence in Academe,” Presumed Incompetent Vol. 2, edited by Yolanda Flores Niemann et al., Utah State UP, 2020, pp. 259-268.
• "Becoming Useless: Masculinity, Able-Bodiedness, and Empire in Nineteenth-Century Spain,” Unsettling Colonialism: Transoceanic Perspectives on Gender and Race in the Nineteenth-century Hispanic World, Eds. Akiko Tsuchiya and N. Michelle Murray, SUNY UP, 2019.
• “Bella y Varonil’: Looking Back at Mauricia in Benito Pérez Galdós's Fortunata y Jacinta,” Special Issue: Freakish Encounters: Constructions of the Freak in Hispanic Cultures. Eds. Sara Muñoz-Muriana and Analola Santana. Hispanic Issues Online 20 (2018): 156–174.
• “Between Intimacy and Enmity: Spain and the Philippines Post-Suez,” Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies 17.4 (2016): 305-322.
• “Blood, Purity, and Pleasure in Leopoldo Alas’s La Regenta,” Hispanic Review 84.3 (2016): 299-321.
• “‘Aquellos neófitos indios, chinos o anamitas:’ Asia and the Imperial Imaginary in Doña Luz,” Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies, 18. Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies 18.1 (2014): 235-246.
• “Tiempo loco: Queer Temporality in Emilia Pardo Bazán’s La Tribuna,” Revista de Estudios Hispánicos 48.3 (2014): 549-569.

In the news

• Cornell crafts multifaceted game studies program
• Twenty Affinito-Stewart research grants awarded for the 2022-2023 academic year
• ‘Blood Novels’ explores material, metaphor in Spanish realist fiction
• Disability advocate Eli Clare to speak on COVID-19
• Online game replicates frustrations of research and disability
• Julia Chang: Confounding expectations