Areas of Interest

Professor Ong has done research on the labor market status of minorities and immigrants, displaced high-tech workers, work and welfare and transportation access. He is currently engaged in several projects, including studies on the effects of neighborhood economies on welfare and work, community economic development in minority communities, and the labor market for healthcare workers.

Previous research projects have included studies of the impact of defense cuts on California’s once-dominant aerospace industry, the impact of immigration on the employment status of young African Americans, and the influence of car ownership and subsidized housing on welfare usage. He was co-author of a widely reported 1994 study on Asian Pacific Americans, which challenged the popular stereotype of Asians as the country’s “model minority” by showing they are just as likely as other groups to be impoverished. Dr. Ong has served as an advisor to the U.S. Bureau of the Census, and to the California Department of Social Services and the state Department of Employment Development, as well as the Wellness Foundation and the South Coast Air.

Jinqi Ling’s teaching and research focus on Asian American literary studies as a discourse constructed out of its engagement with and articulation through a specific set of historical contingencies and contexts. He is particularly interested in exploring the referential or cognitive function of this literature, as well as the conditions of its production and reproduction open to symptomatic reading and ideological transcoding. His research method is chiefly informed by versions of Russian Formalism and, to a lesser extent, of structuralism and poststructuralism, with an emphasis on historicized aesthetics and formally motivated cultural criticism.

He is the author of three monographs: Narrating Nationalisms: Ideology and Form in Asian American Literature (Oxford UP, 1998); Across Meridians: History and Figuration in Karen Tei Yamashita’s Transnational Novels (Stanford UP, 2012); and Asian American Literature (Bloomsbury’s essential criticism series, 2022). He is currently working on an article titled “Open Realist Genre, Riven Humanism: Rehistoricizing Yanghill Kang’s East Goes West,” and a book manuscript titled “The Experimental Temper: Early Asian American Prose Fiction and Its Formal Search, 1937-1968.”

Areas of Interest

Critical theory; Asian American literature; genre studies; and representational concerns at the intersection between realism and high modernism/early postmodernism