Andrew Way Leong

Andrew Way Leong is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of California, Berkeley. His research focuses on Japanese diasporic literature in the Americas, queer theory, and critical approaches to literary genre. He holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature (English, Japanese, Spanish) from UC Berkeley and a B.A. in Comparative Literature (English, Spanish, Mathematics) from Dartmouth College. Prior to Berkeley, he served as an assistant professor at Northwestern University.

Leong’s work bridges Japanese and English literary traditions, with special attention to the intersection of language and identity. He is the translator of Shōson Nagahara’s *Lament in the Night* (2012) and is completing a manuscript *A Queer, Queer Race: Orientations for the Lost Generation of Japanese/American Literature*. Since 2021, he has co-edited the Issei Poetry Project at the Japanese American Cultural Center in Los Angeles, focusing on early Japanese American literary archives.

His publications span 20th-century literary studies, queer theory, and transnational cultural analysis. Recent work includes *Queer Types for Early Asian American Literature* (2024) and *Bridging Work and Global Asias: Stars and Sandbars* (2021). Leong teaches courses on Japanese literature, Asian American literature, modernist studies, and global literary theory.

His research emphasizes interdisciplinary methods, combining archival scholarship with critical theory to explore themes of diaspora, gender, and transpacific cultural flows. Current projects include translations of early Japanese American drama and studies of Japanese American literary networks in the pre-exclusion era (1885–1924).