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:

Zong, Emily Yu, and Daisy Bisenieks. “Dark Humor and Invasive Species Storytelling in the Age of Extinction,” Journal of Australian Studies, forthcoming. Accepted on 7 Nov 2024.

Zong, Emily Yu. “The Making of the Asian Australian Novel.” The Cambridge History of the Australian Novel, edited by David Carter. Cambridge University Press, 2023, pp. 502-19.  (10.1017/9781009090049.031)

Zong, Emily Yu. “‘That ‘Willful’ Migrant Adulteress: Female Embodiment and Diasporic Melancholia in Chandani Lokugé’s Softly, As I Leave You.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction,  vol. 64, no. 3, 2023, pp. 453-64. https://doi.org/10.1080/00111619.2022.2049192

Zong, Emily Yu. “Towards an Ethics of Witnessing: Refugee Memory and Community in Gish Jen’s World and Town.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, vol. 64, no. 1, 2023, pp. 61-72. https://doi.org/10.1080/00111619.2021.1891020

Zong, Emily Yu. “Anachronism in the Anthropocene: Plural Temporalities and the Art of Noticing in Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being.” LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory, vol. 32, no. 4, 2021, pp. 305-21. https://doi.org/10.1080/10436928.2021.1977568

Zong, Emily Yu. “Dragon Lovers and Plant Politics: Queering the Nonhuman in Hoa Pham’s Wave and Ellen Van Neerven’s ‘Water’.” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, vol. 28, no. 3, 2021, pp. 1048-65. https://doi.org/10.1093/isle/isaa106

Zong, Emily Yu. “The Voice of Diversity: Picture Brides and Masked Individuality in Julie Otsuka’s The Buddha in the Attic.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing, vol. 57, no. 6, 2021, pp. 841-55. https://doi.org/10.1080/17449855.2021.1964096

Zong, Emily Yu. “Post-apocalyptic Specters and Critical Planetarity in Merlinda Bobis’s Locust Girl.” ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature, vol. 51, no. 4, 2020, pp. 99-123. https://journalhosting.ucalgary.ca/index.php/ariel/article/view/63035

Zong, Emily Yu. “Disturbance of the White Man: Oriental Quests and Alternative Heroines in Merlinda Bobis’s Fish-Hair Woman” JASAL: Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, vol. 16, no. 2, 2017, pp. 1-17. https://openjournals.library.sydney.edu.au/index.php/JASAL/article/view/11419

Zong, Emily Yu. “‘I Protest, Therefore I Am’: Cosmo-multiculturalism, Suburban Dreams, and Difference as Abjection in Hsu-Ming Teo’s Behind the Moon.” Journal of Intercultural Studies, vol. 37, no. 3, 2016, pp. 234-49. https://doi.org/10.1080/07256868.2016.1163535

Zong, Emily Yu. “Transnational Allegory, Domestic Cosmopolitanism: Towards a Cosmofeminine Space in Shirley Lim’s Joss and Gold.” New Scholar, vol. 4, no. 1, 2016, pp. 51-64. https://bit.ly/3wEdKX6

Zong, Emily Yu. “Rethinking Hybridity – Amputated Selves in Asian Diasporic Identity Formation.” Worldmaking: Literature, Language, Culture, edited by Tom Clark, Emily Finlay, and Philippa Kelly. John Benjamins, 2017, pp. 189-200.

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)