Jonathan Chung

Lap-yin Jonathan Chung is a student in the American Studies PhD program at Yale University. His research is focused on the present-day right-wing radicalization of “Asian” populations in the United States – specifically the Chinese diaspora – as well as the history of this contemporary phenomenon. He hopes to develop a methodology that can ground the ideological, psychic, and subjective investments held by such radicalized actors in global political-economic developments and capitalism as a world-spanning social totality. He aims for such a methodology to be able to illuminate the intrinsic and co-constitutive relation between large-scale social-structural changes and everyday forms of social life and subjectivity.

Jonathan received a B.A. in History with Honors from the University of Chicago in 2022, where he was introduced to critical theory and wrote his undergraduate thesis on the history of celibacy in the Hindu Nationalist Movement in India. In 2024, he received an M.A. in East Asian Regional Studies from Columbia University, writing his Master’s thesis on an “indigenous manosphere” that had proliferated in recent years on Hong Kong’s LIHKG internet forum. As a source base for the latter project, Jonathan translated Cantonese-language forum posts and comments into English, and is broadly interested in experimenting with research methods and what constitutes a valid source.