Jian Neo Chen is associate professor of queer studies in the department of Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies. Chen is affiliate faculty in the English department and Film Studies program and a previous director of Asian American Studies (Autumn 2020) and Sexuality Studies (2017-2018) programs. His research focuses on trans, Two-Spirit, and gender expansive expression and experience in literature, visual fields, cultures of science, and contemporary theory—and their potential reconstruction of social relations and movements. His first book, Trans Exploits: Trans of Color Cultures and Technologies in Movement (Duke University Press, 2019), explores the displaced emergences of trans of color cultural expression and activism through performance, film/video, literature and digital media by the second decade of the twenty-first century, following fifty years of minimal civil rights reforms and renewed state and social technologies of racial gendering. Trans Exploits received the 2021 Association for Asian American Studies Book Award in Social Sciences and was a Lambda Literary Award Finalist in LGBTQ Studies in 2020. Chen is working on two new manuscripts. His second book Trans Experience: Trans Auto-Writing in Orders of Literature and Knowledge focuses on trans, Two-Spirit, and gender expansive nonfiction and fiction, including autotheory, memoir, novels, and other forms of life writing, in U.S. territories in the Americas from the mid-twentieth to twenty-first centuries. Chen’s third book on trans/Pacifics draws from archives of European and American exploration in Oceania, islands in the Pacific, and the Asia-Pacific Rim beginning in the sixteenth century to delimit Western epistemologies of science and gender/sex.

Since 2021, Chen has served as a co-editor of the ASTERISK book series at Duke University Press with Susan Stryker and Eliza Steinbock. He also supports public humanities trans scholarship as a steering committee member for the Mellon-funded TEN:TACLES (Transgender Educational Network: Theory in Action for Creativity, Liberation, Empowerment, and Service) project, which launched in the summer of 2024. He was an editorial board member of the Transgender Studies Quarterly from 2014 to 2020. Chen has organized numerous public events, conferences, and internal knowledge sharing gatherings for academic units at OSU and beyond to help build networks across communities at the university and across academic and nonacademic sectors.

Selected Publications 

• “White Capitalist Patriarchy—The Informatics of Domination—The Transpacific Frontier.” Informatics of Domination, edited by Zach Blas, Jenny Rhee, and Melody Jue. Durham: Duke University Press, forthcoming 2025.
• “Trans Futures” special issue (co-editor), Transgender Studies Quarterly, vol. 6, no. 4 (November 2019). 
• Trans Exploits: Trans of Color Cultures and Technologies in Movement. Durham: Duke University Press (ANIMA series), November 2019. 
• “Trans Riot: Transmasculine of Colour Expressions and Embodiments in the Films of Christopher Lee.” Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas, vol. 4, no. 3, 2018, pp. 297-312. 
• “#BlackLivesMatter and the State of Asian/America.” Journal of Asian American Studies, vol. 20, no. 2, June 2017, pp. 265-271. 
• “Asian American Queer and Trans Activisms.” The Routledge Handbook of Asian American Studies, edited by Cindy I-Fen Cheng. New York: Routledge, 2016. pp. 318-327. 
• “TRANScoding the Transnational Digital Economy.” Trans Studies: Beyond Hetero/Homo Normativities, edited by Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel and Sarah Tobias. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2016. pp. 83-100. (Book received 2017 CUNY Center for LGBTQ Studies Sylvia Rivera Award in Transgender Studies.) 
• “Transmedia.” In "Postposttranssexual: Terms for a 21st Century Transgender Studies," Transgender Studies Quarterly, vol. 1, no. 1-2, May 2014, pp. 245-248.