Emily Yu Zong is an environmental humanities scholar, literary critic, and curator. She received her PhD from the University of Queensland, Australia where she previously taught gender studies and Australian literature. Her research examines migrant and refugee studies and environmental storytelling in the context of climate change, multispecies ethics, and toxic injustice.

Her book Planetarity from Below: Decolonial Ecopoetics of Migration and Diaspora (in press with University of Michigan Press, 2025) theorises the epistemic coloniality of migration while enriching the field of ecocriticism by examining the planetary imaginations and collective ethics in migrant and refugee eco-literature and eco-cinema. Through translocal analyses of migration cultural works across Australia, North America, and China, covering a range of migratory subjects – diasporic settlers, Indigenous peoples, refugees and asylum seekers, climate migrants, and migrant workers – the book provides a more complex and decolonial understanding of migrant ecologies in the Anthropocene.

Emily has published widely on Asian diasporic identity, migrant women’s subjecthood and agency, race, ethnicity and multiculturalism, and cosmopolitanism. Her work appears in Critique, ARIEL, ISLE, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Journal of Intercultural Studies, JASAL, The Cambridge History of the Australian Novel, among other venues. With Jeffrey Santa Ana, she is co-editing Decolonising Asian Diasporic Ecocriticism, a special journal issue of ARIEL.

She has also curated and directed a number of eco-art exhibitions, including Bovine Calling: A VR Immersive Story on Eco-Vulnerability in Hong Kong (2023) and Healing Atmospheres (2024), which collaborate between environmental and health humanities through digital storytelling and partner with the Medical Ethics and Humanities Unit at University of Hong Kong; and Waterborne: A Climate Art Exhibition (2022) and Thus, Soil (2024).

Courses Taught:

Posthuman Futures
Climate Change Literature and Culture
Environmental Humanities: Key Concepts
Intercultural Studies

1. Cosmopolitanism in Asian Diasporic Literature:

Emily’s work on Asian diasporic literary criticism cluster around two dominant themes: the formation of diasporic identity in national and transnational contexts, and the politics of representation in diasporic women’s writing. She is especially interested in developing a cosmopolitan literacy that examines Asian diasporic subjecthood and agency within cultural pluralist frameworks. This approach is exemplified in her JIS article that rereads the model minority narrative in relation to new forms of cultural racism and cosmo-multicultural capital in Australia, and in her Critique article that calls for a shift of political engagement with refugee cultural memory from a “politics of recognition” to an “ethics of witnessing.”

2. Race and Ecology in the Anthropocene

The other thread of her work focuses on the intersection between race and ecology in Asian diasporic literature. This work is at the forefront of an emerging scholarship that recognises the importance of race and ethnicity in environmental literature. Her contribution to this conversation is particularly informed by the ways that posthuman and speculative cultural forms inspire new ways of theorising ethnic and migrant Asian subjectivity. For example, in an ISLE article, she explores how multispecies collaboration shapes a political future of posthuman queerness in Asian Australian speculative fiction.

Books/edited volumes

Zong, Emily Yu. Planetarity from Below: Decolonial Ecopoetics of Migration and Diaspora. In press with University of Michigan Press.

Zong, Emily Yu, and Jeffrey Santa Ana, editors. Decolonising Asian Diasporic Ecocriticism (forthcoming special issue of ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature, Johns Hopkins University Press)

Peer-reviewed Articles:

Curator. Waterborne水生: A Climate Art Exhibition. 17-21 Nov 2022. TriAngle Space, HKBU. A Waste to Art Project. Hong Kong. Download booklet: https://bit.ly/3VRhJtX

Director and Producer, in collaboration with Dr Alex Gearin (HKU). Bovine Calling: A VR Story on Eco-vulnerability in Hong Kong. (An immersive film and art exhibition on the entangled worlds of buffalos, cows, and humans as they navigate vulnerability and alterity in Hong Kong, KMK Gallery, HKBU, 22-28 Sep, 2023)

Producer, in collaboration with Dr Alex Gearin (HKU). Healing Atmospheres: A VR Story on Topo-poetic Care in Hong Kong. 2024. (forthcoming 2024)

Curator. Thus, Soil: Art Exhibition. 03-19 April 2024. Au Shue Hung Memorial Library, HKBU. Download booklet: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1J83WVQJp_7lx9pMT-w7UxxE1Ol1mOhIF/view?usp=drive_link

1. 2022-2024, Principal Investigator, “Towards Anti-Racist Nature: Asian Australian Environmental Literature and Art” Early Career Scheme (ECS), Hong Kong Research Grants Council (HKD 390,132). 
2. 2023-2024, Principal Investigator, “Multispecies Storytelling” Arts Faculty Research Impact Fund, Hong Kong Baptist University (HKD 50,000) 
3. 2021-2022, Principal Investigator, “Cultural Imaginations of Invasive Species” Arts Faculty Start-up Research Grant, Hong Kong Baptist University (HKD 100,000) 
4. 2018-2020, Principal Investigator, “Posthuman Perspectives in Asian Diasporic Literature”, China Postdoctoral Science Foundation Project (International Recruitment Scheme, RMB 600,000) 
5. 2022. Teaching Grant, “Waterborne: A Climate Art Exhibition,” Centre for Innovative Service Learning, Hong Kong Baptist University (HKD 40,500)