Julia Chang

Overview

Julia Chang is Assistant Professor of Spanish in the Department of Romance Studies, a member of the core faculty in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and affiliated faculty in the Southeast Asia Program. She holds a PhD in Hispanic Language and Literatures with a Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender, and Sexuality from the University of California, Berkeley. She has also taught at Brown University and San Quentin State Prison with the Prison University Project (currently Mount Tamalpais College). She is a member of the research group TRECE (Taller de raza, etnicidad, y ciudadanía en España at Northwestern University. Her areas of research and teaching include modern and contemporary Spanish literature and culture; feminist and queer theory; medical hygiene; disability studies; race and anti-racist pedagogy; and the nineteenth-century Philippines.

Chang’s first book Blood Novels: Gender, Caste, and Race in Spanish Realism (forthcoming with University Toronto Press) recuperates the cultural and literary significance of blood in late nineteenth-century Spain and in turn, unsettles a dominant assumption of the period—that blood recedes as a meaningful analytic, eclipsed by race and sexuality. Identifying a masculine fascination with women’s bloodlines and bleeding, Chang argues that exemplars of Spanish realist fiction explore blood’s duality (metaphor and matter) as a meditation on the tenets of realism and, perhaps more surprisingly, a theory of gendered subjectivity.

Chang also has two new research projects. The first tentatively titled “Able-Empire” theorizes the concept of utility in relation to masculinity and ableism in the aftermath of Spanish colonial defeat and amid the rise of fascism. The second examines the racialized and gendered contours of Hispano-Filipino relations following the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, looking at artists and authors including Juan Luna, Graciano Lopéz Jaena, and Emilia Pardo Bazán.

MEDIA

Spectacular Bodies: Racism, Pregnancy, and the Code of Silence in Academe

Professors and Students Demand Institutional Change Against Anti-Asian Racism

In Defense of Theory

RECENT COURSES

Research Focus

• Modern Peninsular Literature and Culture
• Spanish Imperialism and the Philippines
• Gender Studies
• Feminism and Feminist Theory
• Queer Theory
• History of Medicine
• Disability Studies

Publications

• “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

• 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