Rate My Professor Karen Tongson

Karen Tongson is the Barbra Streisand Professor of Contemporary Gender Studies and Professor of English, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California, where she chairs the Department of Gender and Sexuality Studies. She earned a Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Berkeley in 2003 and a B.A. in English from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1995. After completing her doctorate, Tongson held the University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship in Literature at the University of California, San Diego from 2003 to 2005 and a postdoctoral fellowship in the Queer Locations Working Group at the University of California Humanities Research Institute at UC Irvine in 2004. Her research interests include queer and gender studies, minority discourse, popular culture encompassing pop music, television, entertainment and media cultures, suburban studies, performance, Los Angeles and the Southern California region, food and taste cultures, contemporary literature, 19th-century British literature, theory, and aesthetics.

Tongson is the author of Normporn: Queer Viewers and the TV that Soothes Us (2023), Why Karen Carpenter Matters (2019), which was nominated for the Lambda Literary Award in LGBTQ Nonfiction, listed among Pitchfork’s Best Music Books of 2019, and longlisted for The Believer Book Award in 2020, and Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries (2011). She co-authored Migrant Musicians: Filipino Entertainers and the Work of Music Making (limited edition, 2013). She has held visiting appointments including Presidential Visiting Fellow at Yale University in 2024-25, LeBoff Distinguished Visiting Faculty Fellow in Media, Culture and Communication at New York University in spring 2025, Hunt-Simes Chair in Sexuality Studies at the University of Sydney in 2023, International Visiting Professor of Queer Studies at Universität Bielefeld in 2014, and Visiting Professor of Performance Studies at New York University in 2010. Tongson received the Lambda Literary Jeanne Córdova Award for Lesbian/Queer Nonfiction in 2019. Her editorial roles include Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Popular Music Studies from 2010 to 2013, co-editor of the Postmillennial Pop series at NYU Press from 2010 to 2023, and current co-editor of the Singles book series at Duke University Press. She served as President of the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present from 2021 to 2022 and founded and directs the Mellon-funded Consortium for Gender, Sexuality, Race and Public Culture at USC Dornsife.