Assistant Professor
Full CV available here.
Arianna Qianru James is an Assistant Professor of English with affiliations in the African American & Black Diaspora Studies Program and the Cinema and Media Studies Program in the College of Arts & Sciences at Boston University. She received her Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania in 2025, before which she earned a B.A. in English Literature and Chinese Language & Literature from CUNY Hunter College. She also received a Field of Study Language Interpretation and Translation certificate in Chinese from Nanjing University and American Councils.
Professor James specializes in African American and Asian American literature and film studies. Her book project, A Sense of AfroAsia: Blackness, Asianness, and the Speculative, collapses the boundaries between African American and Asian American literature and theory to experiment in the expansive field of Afro-Asian studies. Invested in ways of reading and being beyond institutionalized field delineation, A Sense of AfroAsia argues that aesthetic markers of AfroAsia beyond bodily encounters speak to a long tradition of crossing and speculative race-making in the U.S. Outside of her primary fields of study, Arianna’s other research and teaching interests include media and fan work, speculative fiction, and digital humanities, as well as constellating theories around queerness, mixedness, and the body.
Research and Teaching Interests:
African American Studies
Asian American Studies
Cinema and Media Studies
Gender and Sexuality Studies
Comparative Race and Empire Studies
Contemporary Literature
Fan Work
Digital Humanities
Selected Publications:
Forthcoming – “Color Blind: Race, Ornament, and Pigment in Passing,” Routledge Companion to Contemporary African American Literature, 2026
Translator (Mandarin to English) for “Unlocking the future: characterizing ‘hope’ in contemporary Chinese science fiction,” Luo Xiaoming, Taylor & Francis, 29 December 2019
Public Writing:
“Patricia Powell: On Ackee and Saltfish, And to Terroir the Self,” Kitchen Marronage, Dark Laboratory, May 2023
“On Body Image and China,” Vice News, TONIC, February 2018