Associate Professor
Biographical Sketch: Associate Professor, English and Communication Studies & Film and Media SUNY-FIT
Coordinator for Asian Minor
With a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Oregon, Jean Amato has studied, taught and conducted graduate research in Mainland China and Taiwan for over six years. Working in Chinese and English, her research centers on theories of gender and nationalism and the ancestral home and homeland in twentieth century Chinese, diasporic and Chinese American literature and film. She is the recipient of the New York Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching, 2015–16 and the FIT Faculty Excellence Award. She has developed curriculum and taught in areas that include: Representation of Home and Ancestral Homeland in the Humanities, Asian American Literature and History, US Immigration Literature, Gender and Nationalism in World Literature and East Asian Literature, Migration and Diaspora Studies, Global Martial Arts Cinema, and Contemporary Chinese South Korean and East Asian Cinemas; Chinese Literature, Taiwanese Fiction and Film, Homeland, Immigration and Postcolonial Studies in Twentieth-Century World Literature, Chinese Language, Composition, and English as a Second Language.
She is currently working on an updated book version of her doctoral dissertation, “The Representation of Ancestral Home and Homeland in Chinese American Fiction, 1960s-2020s.” Some of her publications include “Ideological Mappings of Gendered Bodies, Nations and Spaces in Louis Chu’s 1961 Chinatown Novel, Eat a Bowl of Tea, in Ecologies of Seeing, eds. Asbjorn Gronstad, Mark Ledbetter (Newcastle: Cam-bridge Scholar’s Press, 2016, 19- 48); “Spatio-Temporal Reterritorializing of Queer Urban Spaces and Bodies in Bai Xianyong’s 1983 Taipei novel Nei Zi 孽子 (Crystal Boys).” Time, the City, and the Literary Imagination. Eds. Anne-Marie Evans and Dr Kaley Kramer. Palgrave Macmillan Literary Urban Studies Series. 2021 “Oxhide II [牛皮二] (2009), Chinese Film-maker Liu Jiayin’s New Geography of the Home,” in Spaces of the Cinematic House: Behind the Screen Door, eds. Fran Pheasant-Kelly, Stella Hockenhull and Eleanor Andrews (New York: Routledge Taylor and Francis, 2015, 106-120); “It All Depends on What You Mean by Home: Metaphors of Return in Chinese American Travel Memoirs from the 1980s to 2010s." CoHaB: Diasporic Constructions of Home and Belonging. ed. Florian Klager, (Berlin, Boston: Walter De Gruyter, 2015. 427-446); “Relocating Notions of National and Ethnic Authenticity in Chinese American and Chinese Literary Theory through Nieh Hualing’s Overseas Chinese Novel, Mulberry and Peach,” Pacific Coast Philology 34.1 (1999): 32– 52.