Dr. Jennifer Cho Named Winner of 2024 CAALS Academic Essay Prize

Dr. Jennifer Cho was recognized as the winner of the 2024 CAALS Academic Essay Prize for her work for the ALA Conference in Boston (May 2023)!

The Circle for Asian American Literary Studies (CAALS) Essay Prize was established in 2013 as an annual award to recognize the best paper on Asian American literature presented at a CAALS-sponsored panel at AAAS or ALA. In the past, the award primarily focused on graduate or undergraduate student work. But, this past year, the Essay Prize Committee created a new academic category to recognize work by non-tenure track scholars.

The Essay Prize Committee, composed of a select group of CAALS board members, shared these generous words for Dr. Cho’s Essay, “Techno-Orientalist Domesticities: Short Circuits in Machine Labor in After Yang and The School for Good Mothers.”

Cho’s is a sharp, astute paper whose strong analytical edge provides exciting new avenues and definitions of techno-Orientalism. We applaud how forcefully Cho situates her literary readings within the historical context of the Page Act to formulate a compelling argument for how techno-Orientalism become domesticated into the multicultural family and enacted in the gender politics of the modern family home. Indeed, the committee agreed that the deftness with which Cho develops the literary, theoretical, and historical strands of her argument sets her work apart – this paper seemed less like a conference paper and had all the polish of something ready for publication. Cho’s work elucidates her findings so clearly that her argument remains accessible while complex, the kind of scholarly contribution one is delighted to come across from any field.

You can read Dr. Cho’s essay here.