Jennifer Ann Ho

The daughter of a refugee father from China and an immigrant mother from Jamaica, Jennifer Ho is the director of the Center for Humanities & the Arts at the University of Colorado Boulder, where she also holds an appointment as Professor of Ethnic Studies.

Ho received her PhD in English from Boston University (2003) and her BA in English from the University of California at Santa Barbara (1992). She is the president of the Association for Asian American Studies (2020-2022) and the author of two co-edited collection of essays, "Teaching Approaches to Asian North American Literature" (with Jenny Wills -- forthcoming 2022), "Narrative, Race, and Ethnicity in the United States "(with Jim Donahue and Shaun Morgan, Ohio State University Press 2017) and three scholarly monographs, "Consumption and Identity in Asian American Coming-of-Age Novels" (Routledge 2005), "Racial Ambiguity in Asian American Culture" (Rutgers University Press 2015), which won the South Atlantic Modern Language Association award for best monograph, and "Understanding Gish Jen" (University of South Carolina Press 2015). She has published in journals such as Modern Fiction Studies, Journal for Asian American Studies, Amerasia Journal, The Global South, Southern Cultures, and Oxford American and a variety of edited collections and anthologies.

Ho been interviewed by various NPR affiliate shows, the AMA Journal of Ethics, the National Committee on US-China Relations, The Wall Street Journal, PEN America, USA Today, the NBC Today Show (on-line), Liberated Panda, and other news outlets and written for CNN and the Conversation. She is also one of four subjects in Yi Chen’s documentary film "First Vote." Her next two academic projects are a breast cancer memoir and a monograph that will consider Asian Americans in the global south through the narrative of her maternal family’s immigration from Hong Kong to Jamaica to North America. In addition to her academic work, Ho is active in community engagement around issues of race and intersectionality, leading workshops on anti-racism and how to talk about race in our current political climate. You can follow her on Twitter @drjenho.