This talk examines how academia cultivates, manages, and rewards academic labor and argues that to develop more capacious forms of scholarly praxis, we need to embrace teaching, research, and service as speculative genres. Examining these issues within the context of the multidisciplinary field of Global Asias, I propose alien form as a paradigm that makes visible how forms of academic labor whose incongruency with existing determinative definitions of TRS can open up new possibilities for remaking the institutional imperatives of the academic humanities. Like my forthcoming monograph (Alien Forms and Minor Genres, Duke, 2026), I’ll be experimenting with form and structure and looking forward to collaborating with colleagues on how to harness the energies of generic friction in reimagining scholarly work.
Tina Chen is an Associate Professor of English and Asian American Studies at Pennsylvania State University. She is also the founding director of the Global Asias Initiative at Penn State and founding editor of Verge: Studies in Global Asias. She received her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley and a MA and BA from Georgetown. Chen has published broadly, including two recent books, Global Asias: Tactics & Theories (2025), a collaborative project that serves as the inaugural volume of a new Global Asias book series with the University of Hawai’i Press, and Alien Form: Global Asias and Other Speculative Genres of Academic Labor (Duke, 2026). Through her research, teaching, and mentorship, Chen is committed to developing platforms that encourage multidisciplinary engagement and the cross-pollination of knowledge across disciplinary and field boundaries.