Meg Wesling

Meg Wesling is Associate Professor of US Literatures at UC San Diego, and an affiliate of the Critical Gender Studies Program. She is past faculty director of UC Education Abroad Program in France (2013-2015). She earned her doctorate from Cornell University (English) and her bachelor’s degree from Indiana University (French and Women’s Studies). She is the past recipient of a year-long faculty fellowship at the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University, and of the Hellman and other faculty research fellowships at UC San Diego. Professor Wesling’s monograph, Empire’s Proxy: American Literature and US Imperialism in the Philippines, was published by NYU Press in 2011. She is also the author of numerous essays on American literature, sexuality studies, and feminist theory and queer theory.

Pronouns: she/her

Languages: English, French

Books

• Empire’s Proxy: American Literature and U.S. Imperialism in the Philippines. New York: NYU Press, April 2011.  LINK

Articles & Book Chapters

• “The Opacity of Everyday Life: Segregation and the Iconicity of Uplift on The Street” American Literature 78.1 (March 2006): 117-140.
• “Colonial Education and the Politics of Knowledge in Carlos Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart” MELUS 32.2 (Summer 2007): 55-78.
• “Why Queer Diaspora?” Feminist Review 90.1 (October 2008): 30-47.
• “Queer Value” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 18.1 (Winter 2012): 107-125.
• “Neocolonialism, Queer Kinship, and Diaspora: Contesting the Romance of the Family in Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night and Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory” Textual Practice 24.4 (Summer 2011): 649-670.
• “Epistemologies of Empire: Sexuality and Knowledge within the Neoliberal Academy” American Quarterly 65.2 (June 2013): 291-302.
• “American Modernism on Display: Tourism and Literary Form in the Works Progress Administration’s Guide Series” Amerikastudien/American Studies 58.3 (2013): 427-450.
• “The Unequal Promise of Marriage Equality” American Quarterly 66.1 (March 2014): 171-179.
• “The Erotics of a Livable Life: Colonial Power and the Affective Work of Queer Desire in Monique Truong’s The Book of Salt” Mosaic. Special Issue Queer/Affect 48.1 (March 2015): 131-146.
• “Sexuality and Statelessness: Black Queer Diasporic Consciousness in Giovanni’s Room” Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Special Issue on Postcolonial Sexualities. 55.3 (June 2019): 323-336.
• “This Grisly Act of Love: Monstrous Heterosexuality in Giovanni’s Room” Modern Fiction Studies 68.3 (Fall 2022): 434-459
• “Different Ways of Being Gay: History and Queer Identity in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home” Contemporary Literature 63.1 (Spring 2022): 107-136.
• “Gay Genes and the Neoliberal State: A Queer Challenge to Biological Explanations of Sexuality” Feminist Studies 48.3 (2022): 790-805.

• Ph.D. in English Cornell University, 2004
• M.A. in Cultural Studies, Carnegie Mellon University, 1998
• B.A. in French (with certificate in Women's Studies), Indiana University, 1995