Associate Professor, Department of English, Smith College; Founding Chair, Five Colleges Asian/Pacific/American Studies Certificate Program
Floyd Cheung is associate professor of English language and literature and of American studies. He is also a member of the Five College Asian/Pacific/American Studies Certificate Program, for which he served as the founding chair. In 2012, he was awarded with the Kathleen Compton Sherrerd, ’54, and John J. F. Sherrerd Prize for Distinguished Teaching.
Born in Hong Kong, he grew up in Las Vegas, earned his B.A. at Whittier College, and his M.A. and Ph.D. in English at Tulane University. At Smith, he teaches courses in American literature, American studies, and Asian American literature and culture. In each of these fields, Professor Cheung has published articles in academic journals. Interested in the recovery of early Asian American texts, Professor Cheung has edited H. T. Tsiang’s novels And China Has Hands (Ironweed Press, 2003) and The Hanging on Union Square (Kaya Press, 2013) and co-edited Kathleen Tamagawa’s memoir, Holy Prayers in a Horse’s Ear (Rutgers UP, 2008). With Keith Lawrence, he co-edited and contributed a chapter to Recovered Legacies: Authority and Identity in Early Asian American Literature (Temple University Press, 2005). With Lavina Dhingra, he co-edited and contributed a chapter to Naming Jhumpa Lahiri: Canons and Controversies (Lexington-Rowman and Littlefield, 2012). His own attempts to produce Asian American literature have taken poetic form and can be found in such journals as Mascara Literary Review, qarrtsiluni, and Rhino. His chapbook of poems is entitled Jazz at Manzanar.