Kevin Pat Fong

I am a fifth-year doctoral candidate working under the co-supervision of Dr. Sarah Casteel and Dr. Catherine Khordoc. My main areas of expertise are comics studies and critical race theory with a particular interest in how Asianness is represented in graphic novels involving characters of Asian descent.

I have a background in Communication and French and I completed my master’s in French literature at Simon Fraser University under the supervision of Dr. Jorge Calderón. For my M.A., I focused on the contruction of racial identity through alterity and worked on French contemporary novels and films.

Doctoral Project

My doctoral project is about the representation of the relationship between characters of Asian descent and the practice of racial passing in contemporary/alternative comic books. I look at how protagonists interact with the (in)ability to pass and how they cope with their racial identities in Western societies.

My corpus includes Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Aminder Dhaliwal’s Cyclopedia Exotica, Jung’s Couleur de Peau: Miel, Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese, The Shadow Hero (with Sonny Liew), and Superman Smashes the Klan (with Gurihiru), .

Areas of Academic Interest

Comic Studies, Critical Race Theory (Racial Passing)