Alvin Henry, Ph.D.

With the absence of Asian American Studies at SDSU, Professor Alvin Henry was hired to design a career-ready and modern major and minor that would help students enter a variety of career fields and would educate students using high-impact pedagogies. Professor Henry is the inaugural Chair of Asian American Studies. In recognition of the importance of establishing Asian American Studies, the Mellon Foundation provided Henry significant grant funding to bring the department, major, and minor into existence. This once in a lifetime opportunity allows the department to bring students into our local communities to learn from the rich everyday cultural practices happening right in San Diego. Students will conduct research, create films, and write stories.

Professor Henry is working on three research projects. The first explores how creative writers, comedians, and filmmakers work through the tensions between race ("Asian American") and ethnicity (e.g., Filipino or Vietnamese). The project argues that these artists invent new storytelling techniques to capture their experiences. The second project looks at how Asian Americans experience higher education and how, in turn, higher education shapes Asian American identity. The third project examines how students experience career education and career readiness. Using LLMs and interactive AI agents, Henry is surveying students’ engagements with preparing for careers. 

In 2020, Henry published Black Queer Flesh: Rejecting Subjectivity in the African American Novel. Henry argues that African American novelists challenged white supremacy by challenging dominant, humanist models of the self. African American novelists, he shows, experimented with radical new forms of selfhood. In 2013, he published Psychoanalysis in Context, which is a collection of cutting-edge research on psychoanalysis and cultural critique. 

As a first-generation college student, Professor Henry believes in the transformational power of education. He has worked in PreK-12 education for the NAACP and designed a career initiative program for a liberal arts college as well as SDSU. He also helped the Oakland Unified School District to start their full-service community schools.