Research Bio

Andrew Leong is a comparativist who works primarily in Japanese and English with additional interests in Spanish and Portuguese. 

His research focuses on the literature of Japanese diasporas in the Americas as well as queer and critical theoretical approaches to the study of literary genre, gendered embodiment, and generational time. Leong is the translator of Lament in the Night (Kaya Press 2012), a collection of two novels by Shōson Nagahara, an author who wrote for a Japanese reading public in Los Angeles during the 1920s. Leong is also completing a manuscript entitled A Queer, Queer Race: Orientations for the Lost Generation of Japanese/American Literature. This book examines Japanese and English language texts written by Shōson, Sadakichi Hartmann, Arishima Takeo, and Yoné Noguchi—authors who resided in the United States between the opening of mass Japanese emigration in 1885 and the ban on Japanese immigration imposed by the Immigration Act of 1924.

Since 2021, Leong has served as one of two scholar-editors for the Issei Poetry Project (link is external)at the Japanese Community and Cultural Center (link is external)(JACCC - Los Angeles). Leong is project editor for the Tessaku Translation Collective; a project to engage survivors and descendants of the Tule Lake Segregation Center in community review of English translations of the Tule Lake literary journal Tessaku (Iron Fence). He has also been working on translations of early Japanese American drama -- most recently in the form of a (2022) staged reading of Nagahara Hideaki's 1928 play (link is external)Sariyukumono (link is external)(The Ones Who Leave).

Prior to joining the faculty of UC Berkeley in 2018, Leong was an assistant professor of English and Asian Languages and Cultures at Northwestern University (2012-2018). He received his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature (English, Japanese, Spanish) from UC Berkeley in 2012, and completed his B.A. in Comparative Literature (English, Spanish, Mathematics) at Dartmouth College in 2003.

Research Expertise and Interest

19th century American literature, 20th and 21st century American literature, Asian American, Pacific, critical theory, cultural studies, gender and sexuality studies