Karen Tongson

Queer & Gender Studies; Minority Discourse; Popular Culture (Pop Music, TV, Entertainment & Media Cultures); Suburban Studies; Performance; Los Angeles & the Southern California Region; Food & Taste Cultures; Contemporary Literature; 19th-Century British Literature; Theory; Aesthetics

Karen Tongson is Professor of gender & sexuality studies, English and American studies & ethnicity, and chair of the Department of Gender & Sexuality Studies. She is the 2019 recipient of the Lambda Literary Jeanne Córdova Award for Lesbian/Queer Nonfiction, and the author of  Normporn: Queer Viewers and the TV that Soothes Us (2023), Why Karen Carpenter Matters (2019; Lambda Literary Award nominee in LGBTQ Nonfiction; Pitchfork’s Best Music Books of 2019, The Believer Book Award, longlist, 2020), Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries (2011). For ten years, she co-edited the award-winning book series, Postmillennial Pop with Henry Jenkins at NYU Press. Currently, she serves as editor-at-large at air/light, and on several other editorial boards for scholarly journals. Her writing and cultural commentary have appeared in Slate, NPR, The Criterion Collection, The Los Angeles Review of Books, PBS NewsHour, The Los Angeles Times, KCRW’s Good Food, BuzzFeed Reader, The Washington Post, The AV Club, Entertainment Weekly and Süddeutsche Zeitung, among other venues. She is the founder and director of the Mellon-funded Consortium for Gender, Sexuality, Race & Public Culture at USC Dornsife. Tongson co-created, co-hosted and co-produced the podcast Waiting to X-Hale with Wynter Mitchell-Rohrbaugh from 2019-2023. Together, they also co-curated the LA Philharmonic’s 2022 GenX Festival.  Tongson continues to co-host the podcast The Gaymazing Race with Nicole J. Georges. She seved as President of the Association for Studies of the Arts of the Present in 2022, and co-organized the ASAP/13 conference in Los Angeles at UCLA that same year. ongson held a Hunt-Simes Chair in Sexuality Studies at the University of Sydney in 2023. In 2024-25, she will be a Presidential Visiting Fellow at Yale University, as well as the LeBoff Distinguished Visiting Faculty Fellow in Media, Culture and Communication at NYU in spring 2025.

Before coming to USC, Tongson received her Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Berkeley in 2003. She held a University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship in Literature at UC San Diego (2003-2005), and a UC Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI) Postdoctoral Fellowship at UC Irvine (2004).

Tongson has also held invited visiting positions at NYU Tisch (in Performance Studies, 2010), Universität Bielefeld (Linguistik und Literaturwissenschaft, 2014), and the University of Sydney (Social Sciences and Humanities Advanced Research Center, 2023). 

• Ph.D. English, University of California, Berkeley, 2003
• B.A. English, University of California, Los Angeles, 1995