Hsuan L. Hsu

Education and Degree(s)

PhD, University of California, Berkeley, 2004                   

A.B., Harvard University, 1998

Profile

Hsuan l. Hsu joined the UC Davis faculty in 2008. His interests include 19th and 20th-Century U.S. literature, Asian American Literature, visual culture, cultural geography, comparative racialization, and environmental justice literature. He is the author of Geography and the Production of Space in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Cambridge, 2010) and Sitting in Darkness: Mark Twain, Asia, and Comparative Racialization (NYU, 2015). He is working on a manuscript entitled The Smell of Risk: Atmospheric Disparities and the Olfactory Arts (under contract with NYU Press), which considers olfactory aesthetics as a mode of engaging with environmental injustice in literature, art, memoir, and law. His recent courses have examined topics such as geographies of risk, transnational American literature, medical humanities, aerial aesthetics, and race and realism. He has served on the editorial boards of American Literature, Literary Geographies, the Journal of Transnational American Studies, American Literary Realism, and the Broadview Anthology of American Literature, the Executive Council of the American Literature Society, and the Executive Committee of the MLA's forum for Nineteenth-Century American Literature. His research has been supported by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, NEH, ACLS, the Davis Humanities Institute, the Creative Capital/Andy Warhol Foundation's Arts Writers Program, Stanford's Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and the UC Humanities Research Institute.

Books & Edited Projects

• The Smell of Risk: Atmospheric Disparities and the Olfactory Arts (under contract, NYU Press)
• Sitting in Darkness: Mark Twain, Asia, and Comparative Racialization. NYU, 2015.
• Geography and the Production of Space in Nineteenth-Century American Literature. Cambridge University Press, 2010. 257pp.
• (ed.) Literary Atmospherics. Themed essay cluster for the journal Literary Geographies. Guest editor. forthcoming.
• (ed.) Mark Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson and Those Extraordinary Twins. Broadview Press, 2016.
• (ed.) Circa 1898. Special Forum for the Journal of Transnational American Studies. Guest Editor. Vol.3, Issue 2 (2011).
• (ed.) Sui Sin Far (Edith Maud Eaton)'s Mrs. Spring Fragrance. Broadview Press, 2011.
• (intro, notes, and appendices) John Rollin Ridge, The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta. Penguin, 2018.
• Representing Environmental Risk in the Landscapes of US Militarization. exhibition. Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society/LMU Munich. 2014.

Articles and Essays

• "Smelling Setting." Modernism/Modernity Print Plus 3:1 (Mar 9, 2018) online.
• "Literary Atmospherics." Literary Geographies 3:1 (2017) 1-5.
• "Olfactory Art, Trans-Corporeality, and the Museum Environment." Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities 4:1 (Winter 2016) 1-24.
• "Naturalist Smellscapes and Environmental Justice." American Literature 88:4 (Dec 2016) 787-814
• "The Smell of Risk." In Peter de Cupere: Scent in Context, Olfactory Art (Brussels: Stockmans, 2016) 87-91.
• "Mark Twain...and Zombies!" Common-Place: The Journal of Early American Life 16:3 (2016) online.
• "Literary Topographies and the Scales of Environmental Justice." ELN (English Language Notes) 52:1 (2014).
• "Gravity: A 3D Movie About 3D Movies." Avidly (Nov 2013).
• "Sitting in Darkness: Mark Twain and America's Asia." American Literary History 25:1 (Spr 2013) 69-84.
• "The Invasion of Echo Park." Boom: A Journal of California 2:3 (2012) 86-89.

• "Guahan (Guam), Literary Emergence, and the American Pacific in Homebase and from unincorporated territory." American Literary History 24:2 (Summer 2012): 281-307.
• "Fatal Contiguities: Metonymy and Environmental Justice." New Literary History 42:1 (Winter 2011) 147-68.
• "Asian American Chronotopes and the American West." In A Companion to the Literature and Culture of the American West. Ed. Nicolas Witschi. Oxford: Blackwell, 2011. 145-60.
• "Mika Rottenberg's Productive Bodies." Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies 25:2 (2010) 40-73.
• "A Connecticut Yankee in the Court of Wu Chih Tien: Mark Twain and Wong Chin Foo." Common-Place: The Interactive Journal of Early American Life 11:1 (Oct 2010).
• "Vagrancy, Comparative Racialization, and Civil Death in Huckleberry Finn." American Literature 81:4 (Dec 2009) 687-717.
• "The Dangers of Biosecurity: The Host and the Geopolitics of Outbreak." Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media 51 (Spring 2009).
• "Health Media and Global Inequalities." Co-authored with Martha Lincoln. Daedalus: Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 138:2 (Spring 2009), 20-30.
• "New Regionalisms: Literature and Uneven Development." In A Companion to the Modern American Novel. Ed. John T. Matthews (Oxford: Blackwell, 2009), 218-39. 
• Race, Environment, and Representation. Co-edited with Mark Feldman. Special issue of Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture 29:2-3 (Spring and Fall 2007).
• "Biopower, Bodies...the Exhibition, and the Spectacle of Public Health." Co-authored with Martha Lincoln. Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture 29:1 (Winter 2007): 15-34.
• American Literary Geographies: Spatial Practice and Cultural Production, 1500-1900. Co-edited with Martin Brückner. University of Delaware Press, 2007.
• Wong Chin Foo's Periodical Writing and Chinese Exclusion. Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture 39:3-4 (Fall/Winter 2006): 83-105.
• Asian American Subgenres, 1853-1945. Part I. Part II. Guest editor. Special double issue of Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture 39:3-4 (Fall/Winter 2006).
• "Racial Privacy, the L.A. Ensemble Film, and Paul Haggis's Crash." Film Criticism 31:1 (Fall/Winter 2006): 132-56.
• "Mimicry, Spatial Captation, and Feng Shui in Han Ong's Fixer Chao." Modern Fiction Studies 52:3 (Fall 2006): 675-704.
• "Who Wears the Mask?" Review Essay. minnesota review 67 (Fall 2006): 169-75.
• "Literature and Regional Production." American Literary History 17:1 (Spring 2005): 36-69.
• "Authentic Recreations: Ideology, Practice, and Regional History along Buena Park's Entertainment Corridor," in True West: Authenticity in the American West, 304-27, eds. William Handley and Nathaniel Lewis (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 2004).
• "Regarding Mimicry: Race and Visual Ethics in Invisible Man." Arizona Quarterly 59:2 (Summer 2003): 107-40.
• "War, Ekphrasis, and Elliptical Form in Melville's Battle-Pieces." Nineteenth Century Studies 16 (2002): 51-71.
• "Democratic Expansionism in 'Memoirs of Carwin.'" Early American Literature 35:2 (Fall 2000): 137-56.

Awards 

• UC Humanities Research Institute President's Faculty Research Fellowship, 2018-19.

• ACLS Fellowship, 2018-19.
• Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, 2018.
• Davis Humanities Institute Faculty Fellowship, 2018.
• ACLS Frederick Burkhardt Residential Fellowship/Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University 2012-13
• National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend 2012
• Don D. Walker Award for the year's best essay on Western US literature 2010
• Davis Humanities Institute California Cultures Initiative research seminar 2010
• honorable mention, Norman Foerster essay prize, American Literature 2009
• Nineteenth Century Studies Association Emerging Scholars Award 2008
• Margaret Church Memorial essay prize, Modern Fiction Studies 2006
• American Academy of Arts and Sciences Visiting Scholar 2004-5
• Phi Beta Kappa Scholarship 2003-4