Pamela Thoma

  1. Professor
Email Addresspthoma@wsu.edu
LocationAvery 455

Biography

  • Professor of English and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
  • Director, Program in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, 2018-2025
  • Director, Graduate Program in American Studies, 2016-2018
  • PhD, University of Colorado Boulder

Honors & Fellowships

  • Lewis E. and Stella G. Buchanan Distinguished Professor of English, 2021-2024
  • Best Graduate Seminar of the Year, 2020-2021, ENGL 595 Futurity: Feminist and Queer Theoretical Interventions & Genres of Speculation
  • Fulbright American Scholar, “Gender and Citizenship in Asian American Literature and Culture,” 2016-2017 (Okinawa, Japan)
  • Visiting Fellow, The Gender Institute, London School of Economics and Political Science, May-June 2015

Research Interests

  • Asian American Studies
  • Feminist, Queer, and Critical Race Theory
  • Feminist Media and Cultural Studies
  • Health Studies
  • Neoliberalism
  • Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Narrative

Selected Publications

  • Barbie’s Feminisms? In Media Res 31 January 2024.
  • Approaches to Teaching the Works of Karen Tei Yamashita, co-edited with Ruth Y. Hsu. Modern Language Association of America, 2022. (Book)
  • Brazil-Maru and the Narrative Space of Impersonal Feelings” Approaches to Teaching the Works of Karen Tei Yamashita, Modern Language Association of America, 2022. 168-174.
  • “Learning from and Walking Lightly Through Pandemic Racism and Misogyny to Another World.” The American Mosaic: The Asian American Experience, ABC-CLIO, Bloomsbury, 2022.
  • “Contemporary Asian American Women’s Popular Literature and Neoliberal Form” Asian American Literature in Transition, volume 4, Betsy Huang and Victor Mendoza, eds. Cambridge University Press, 2021. 216-238.
  • “Chick Noir: Surveilling Femininity and the Affects of Loss in Gone GirlNoir Affect, Christopher Breu and Elizabeth Hatmaker, eds. Fordham University Press, 2020. 197-221.
  • Asian American Women’s Popular Literature: Feminizing Genres and Neoliberal Belonging. Temple University Press, 2014. (Book)
  • “What Julia Knew: Domestic Labor in the Recession-Era Chick Flick,” Gendering the Recession: Media and Culture in an Age of Austerity. Diane Negra and Yvonne Tasker, eds. Duke University Press, 2014. 107–135.
  • “Neoliberal Maternal Discourse, Tiger Mothers, and Asian American Mother-Daughter Narrative,” Mothering in East Asian Communities: Politics and Practices. Patti Duncan and Gina Wong, eds. Demeter Press, 2014. 95–118.
  • “Buying Up Baby: Modern Feminine Subjectivity, Assertions of ‘Choice,’ and the Repudiation of Reproductive Justice in Postfeminist Unwanted Pregnancy Films,” Feminist Media Studies 9.4 (Dec. 2009): 209–225.
  • “Intercollegiate Web Pedagogy: Possibilities and Limitations of Virtual Asian American Studies,” with John Cheng and Karen Chow, Asian.America.Net, Rachel C. Lee and Sau-Ling Cynthia Wong, eds. Routledge, 2003. 193–212.
  • “Of Beauty Pageants and Barbie: Theorizing Consumption in Asian American Transnational Feminism,” Genders:  A Journal of the Arts, Humanities and Social Theory 29 (1999).

Recent Teaching

  • WGSS 120 Sex, Race, and Reproduction in Global Health Politics
  • WGSS 481 Feminist Theory
  • WGSS 581 Feminist and Queer Theories and Frameworks
  • ENGL 573 Postwork Imaginaries and Contemporary American Narrative Culture
  • ENGL 595 Futurity: Feminist and Queer Theoretical Interventions & Genres of Speculation

CV available upon request