Mel Y. Chen is an academic whose scholarship intersects many fields, including queer theory,

gender studies Gender studies is an interdisciplinary academic field devoted to analysing gender identity and gendered representation. Gender studies originated in the field of women's studies, concerning women, feminism, gender, and politics. The field ...

animal studies Animal studies is a recently recognised field in which animals are studied in a variety of cross-disciplinary ways. Scholars who engage in animal studies may be formally trained in a number of diverse fields, including geography, art history, ant ...

critical race theory Critical race theory (CRT) is a cross-disciplinary examination, by social and civil-rights scholars and activists, of how laws, social and political movements, and media shape, and are shaped by, social conceptions of race and ethnicity. Goa ...

, Asian American studies,

disability studies Disability studies is an academic discipline that examines the meaning, nature, and consequences of disability. Initially, the field focused on the division between "impairment" and "disability," where impairment was an impairment of an individual ...

science studies Science studies is an interdisciplinarity, interdisciplinary research area that seeks to situate scientific expertise in broad social, historical, and philosophical contexts. It uses various methods to analyze the production, representation an ...

, and critical linguistics. Chen (who uses they/them/their pronouns) is currently Associate Professor of Gender & Women's Studies and Director of the Center for the Study of Sexual Culture at the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...

as well as a member of the Board of Directors of the Society for Disability Studies. Chen's first book, ''Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect'' (2012) was published by Duke University Press and received the

Modern Language Association The Modern Language Association of America, often referred to as the Modern Language Association (MLA), is widely considered the principal professional association in the United States for scholars of language and literature. The MLA aims to "st ...

’s GL/Q Caucus' Alan Bray Memorial Book Prize for its contribution to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and/or queer studies in literature and cultural studies. In ''Animacies'', Chen explores the ways in which race, sexuality, and ability are often tied to the basic hierarchical categories that define matter: human, animal and thing."Animacies"
''Books & Journals by Title''. Duke University Press. Accessed 13 March 2016. Chen received a Ph.D. in Linguistics from U.C. Berkeley.

References

UC Berkeley College of Letters and Science alumni Year of birth missing (living people) Living people {{academic-stub