Diane Wong is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University, Newark. She is also an affiliate faculty of Global Urban Studies, American Studies, and Women's and Gender Studies. Previously, she was Assistant Professor and Faculty Fellow in the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University. She holds a Ph.D. in American Politics and M.A. in Comparative Race, Ethnicity, and Immigration from the Department of Government at Cornell University. Currently, she is a faculty fellow at the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice and the Center for Cultural Analysis.
Her research and teaching interests include American politics, race and ethnicity, critical urban studies, comparative immigration, gender and sexuality, cultural and media studies, and community rooted research. Her current book project, You Can’t Evict A Movement: Intergenerational Activism and Housing Justice in New York City, focuses on intergenerational resistance to gentrification in Manhattan’s Chinatown. Her work draws from a combination of methods including ethnography, participatory mapping, archival research, augmented reality, and oral history interviews. Her second book, Contemporary Asian American Activism: Movement Moments and New Visions in the 21st Century, examines a diverse range of issues from sex work decriminalization to abolition, deportation to decolonization, affirmative action to intergenerational memory. Diane is also currently co-guest editor of a special issue on "Asian American Abolition Feminisms" in Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies.
Her research has received the Byran Jackson Dissertation Research on Minority Politics Award, Susan Clarke Young Scholars’ Award, and the Don T. Nakanishi Award for Distinguished Scholarship and Service in Asian Pacific American Politics. Her research has been funded by prestigious grants from the Russell Sage Foundation, National Science Foundation, Centennial Center for Political Science and Public Affairs, Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center, National Endowment for the Humanities, Humanities New York, and Asian Women Giving Circle. Her work has appeared in PS: Political Science & Politics, Urban Affairs Review, Women's Studies Quarterly, Amerasia Journal, Politics, Groups, and Identities, Gateways: International Journal of Community Research and Engagement, Journal of Asian American Studies, Asian American Policy Review, and a variety of edited book volumes, anthologies, podcasts, and exhibitions. Diane is a member of the Edward A. Bouchet Graduate Honor Society, she is also alumni and mentor for the McNair Achievement Scholars Program, Leadership Alliance Mellon Initiative, and the American Political Science Association Minority Fellows Program.
Diane is also a socially engaged artist, as various cultural collectives she has held artist residencies with the Laundromat Project and Fourth Arts Block, her multimedia exhibit "Homeward Bound: Global Intimacies in Converging Chinatowns" is on display at the Pao Arts Center in Boston.