On Friday, December 12, 2025, diASIApora hosted Chris Eng, Assistant Professor of English at the University of Maryland, College Park, for both a lunch with diASIApora members and an evening book talk, hosted in conjunction with the Pembroke Center.

Professor Eng’s book Extravagant Camp: The Queer Abjection of Asian America, published by NYU Press in 2025, “takes as its point of critical departure the multiple valences of the word ‘camp’: the camp, as a geopolitical space and process of concentrating racialized populations, and the campy as a mode of queer expressiveness. Engaging its double meaning, Chris A. Eng explores how camp and encampment have contoured the figure of the Asian American.”

At the lunch, Professor Eng chatted with graduate students about his academic trajectory, recalling his time from graduate school and tracing the development of Extravagant Camp.

In his book talk, “Getting to the Bottom of Camp: The Queer Taint of Japanese American Incarceration,” Chris Eng reassessed narratives that construe the Japanese American incarceration as an experience of hitting the bottom, a violation akin to sodomy, offering a reparative re-reading of Lonny Kaneko’s 1976 short story “The Shoyu Kid.” He unpacked the sticky tropes of brownness and anality in the story as offering an encoded secret about the desirability of organizing around the charge of suspect loyalty.

Thank you for joining us Dr. Eng!