Adeline Koh
Assistant Professor of Postcolonial Literature, The Richard Stockton College of New Jersey
Adeline Koh will be working on two projects during her fellowship. Both of them are centrally concerned with race as a type of social practice and both use the narrative form to explore the concept in intellectual and pedagogical terms.
Her book manuscript, Cosmopolitan Whiteness, is a study of the cultural practices of people of color from Anglophone Southeast Asia, West and Southern Africa, the Caribbean, and the U.K. In it she will explore metaphorical and material manifestations of whiteness that extend beyond racial identify to encompass practices of cultural sophistication, beauty rituals and femininity, and performances of power and masculinity in postcolonial nationalism.
She will also work on the development of Trading Races, a paper-based Alternate Reality/Role Playing Game (ARG/RPG) to be used in undergraduate race and ethnicity courses. In Trading Races, student-players assume characters with ethnicities other than their own, and learn race consciousness through the various obstacles and privileges their characters encounter. She will be developing Trading Races at the GreaterThanGames Lab.
Professor Koh earned her M.A. and Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, both with high distinction, from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. She earned her B.A. in English from the University of Melbourne in Australia. She joined the faculty at Richard Stockton University in 2010 after spending two years as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the National University of Singapore.
