Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies, English and American Studies and Ethnicity; and Chair of the Department of Gender & Sexuality Studies
Karen Tongson is the 2019 recipient of the Lambda Literary Jeanne Córdova Award for Lesbian/Queer Nonfiction, and the author of Normporn: Queer Viewers and the TV that Soothes Us (2023), Why Karen Carpenter Matters (2019; Lambda Literary Award nominee in LGBTQ Nonfiction; Pitchfork’s Best Music Books of 2019, The Believer Book Award, longlist, 2020), Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries (2011).
Currently, she serves as editor-at-large at air/light, and on several other editorial boards for scholarly journals. Her writing and cultural commentary have appeared in Slate, NPR, The Criterion Collection, The Los Angeles Review of Books, PBS NewsHour, The Los Angeles Times, KCRW’s Good Food, BuzzFeed Reader, The Washington Post, The AV Club, Entertainment Weekly and Süddeutsche Zeitung, among other venues.
She is the founder and director of the Mellon-funded Consortium for Gender, Sexuality, Race & Public Culture at USC Dornsife.
Tongson held a Hunt-Simes Chair in Sexuality Studies at the University of Sydney in 2023. In 2024-25, she was a Presidential Visiting Fellow at Yale University, as well as the LeBoff Distinguished Visiting Faculty Fellow in Media, Culture and Communication at NYU in Spring 2025.
Before coming to USC, Tongson received her Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Berkeley in 2003. She held a University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship in Literature at UC San Diego (2003-2005), and a UC Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI) Postdoctoral Fellowship at UC Irvine (2004).
Tongson has also held invited visiting positions at NYU Tisch (in Performance Studies, 2010), Universität Bielefeld (Linguistik und Literaturwissenschaft, 2014), and the University of Sydney (Social Sciences and Humanities Advanced Research Center, 2023).
