Assistant Professor

Race, Ethnicity, & Migration Studies

Leland Tabares (he/him) is an Assistant Professor of Race, Ethnicity, and Migration Studies at Colorado College. His book project, Professionalizing Asian America: Race and Labor in the Twenty-First Century, examines how Asian Americans’ increasing representation in a diverse range of contemporary industry professions—from the university and the modern restaurant industry to the Silicon Valley tech industry and digital media platforms like YouTube and TikTok—enculturates new meanings of race, generationality, and solidarity. His work is published in Profession, Journal of Asian American Studies, Verge: Studies in Global Asias, Arizona Quarterly, Lateral: Journal of the Cultural Studies Association, Hyphen, and The Recipes Project. 

Professor Tabares has also made contributions to his field through his editorial and service work. He was the Managing Editor for Verge: Studies in Global Asias, an award-winning journal in Asian and Asian American Studies published by the University of Minnesota Press. Verge won the 2020 PROSE Award from the Association of American Publishers and the 2016 award for Best New Journal from the Council of Editors of Learned Journals. He served on the Executive Board for the Association for Asian American Studies, co-leading the mentorship and membership committees and coordinating professional development workshops for junior faculty. Currently, he serves on the Advisory Board for the Circle for Asian American Literary Studies.

Prior to coming to Colorado College, Professor Tabares taught at Washington University in St. Louis, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Pennsylvania State University, and Loyola University New Orleans.

Selected Publications

“Working Futures After Asians.” Forthcoming in Techno-Orientalism, Vol. II, edited by David S. Roh, Betsy Huang, Greta Niu, and Christopher T. Fan, Rutgers University Press (2024).

“Consider the Crawfish: The Politics of Viet-Cajun Fusion in the Gulf Coast.” Forthcoming in Verge: Studies in Global Asias 9.2 (2023).

“A&Q: Recipes for Messiness.” Co-authored with Stephen Suh, Ruslan Yusupov, Erica Maria Cheung, and Jennifer R. Shutek. Forthcoming in Verge: Studies in Global Asias 9.2 (2023).

“Danny Bowien’s Post-Authentic Asian America.” The Recipes Project (November 2021).

“Misfit Professionals: Asian American Chefs and Restaurateurs in the Twenty-First Century.” Arizona Quarterly 77.2 (Summer 2021): 103-132.

“Gish Jen’s Resistant Possibilities: On Black Fugitivity, Coalitional Care, and Baseball.” Hyphen (October 2020).

“Professional Amateurs: Asian American Content Creators in YouTube’s Digital Economy.” Journal of Asian American Studies 22.3 (October 2019): 387-417.

“Professionalization and the Precarious State of Academic Freedom for Graduate Student Instructors.” Profession (Winter 2019).

“The Contexts of Critique: Para-Institutions and the Multiple Lives of Institutionality in the Neoliberal University.” Lateral: Journal of the Cultural Studies Association 6.1 (Spring 2017).

Courses Taught

CC120 American Frontiers: From the Wild West to the Apocalypse

RM185 Introduction to the Comparative Study of Race and Ethnicity

RM200 Introduction to Asian American Studies

RM200 Aliens, Robots, and Cyborgs: Techno-Orientalism in Science Fiction

RM200 Eating Asian America: Race and Food

RM215 Research Design: Method and Theory

RM300 Asian American Popular Cultures: Race and Representation

RM300 Race and Capitalism