Research Bio

Long Le-Khac is an assistant professor of Ethnic Studies. His research focuses on the culture and literature of Asian Americans, Latinxs, and other racial minority communities. He studies the powers of culture to reveal related struggles and envision solidarities across different racial groups. His first book, Giving Form to an Asian and Latinx America (Stanford University Press 2020), traces a shared narrative form to reveal that the histories and political struggles of Asian Americans and Latinxs are intertwined. His current project, “Racial Entanglements,” expands this relational study of race to examine how different racial groups, empires, environments, and species are knotted together across Asia, the Pacific, and the U.S. 

The other branch of his research develops data-driven and computational methods to understand Asian American culture at a mass scale. He is the author of The Canon of Asian American Literature, the largest data collection on Asian American literature ever assembled. This data allows us to see the evolution of the Asian American canon over the last fifty years and scrutinize who has been included and excluded in this process. With this data, Le-Khac and his team are uncovering the stories of progress, conflict, and inequality in the formation of Asian American literature. 

His work has been published in Post45 Data Collective, New Literary History, The Cambridge Companion to the American Short Story, Post45 Journal, Journal of Cultural Analytics, MELUS, American Literature, Canon/Archive: Studies in Quantitative Formalism from the Stanford Literary Lab, Victorian Studies, and the Stanford Literary Lab pamphlet series.

Research Expertise and Interest

Asian American literature, Latino/a/x and Caribbean literatures and cultures, relational race studies, digital humanities, migration, narrative