Jian Neo Chen is associate professor of queer studies in the Department of Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies. Chen is affiliate faculty in the Departments of English and Theatre, Film, and Media Arts and a previous director of Asian American Studies (Autumn 2020) and Sexuality Studies (2017-2018) programs. His research focuses on trans, Two-Spirit, and gender expansive expression and experience in literature, visual fields, cultures of science, and contemporary theory—and their potential reconstruction of social relations and movements. His first book, Trans Exploits: Trans of Color Cultures and Technologies in Movement (Duke University Press, 2019), explores the displaced emergences of trans of color cultural expression and activism through performance, film/video, literature and digital media by the second decade of the 21st Century, following fifty years of minimal civil rights reforms and renewed state and social technologies of racial gendering. Trans Exploits received the 2021 Association for Asian American Studies Book Award in Social Sciences and was a Lambda Literary Award Finalist in LGBTQ Studies in 2020. Chen is working on two new manuscripts. His second book Trans Experience: Trans Auto-Writing in Orders of Literature and Knowledge focuses on trans, Two-Spirit, and gender expansive nonfiction and fiction, including autotheory, memoir, novels, and other forms of life writing, in U.S. territories in the Americas from the mid-20th to 21st Centuries. Chen’s third book on trans/Pacifics draws from archives of European and American exploration in Oceania, islands in the Pacific, and the Asia-Pacific Rim beginning in the 16th Century to delimit Western epistemologies of science and gender/sex.

Since 2021, Chen has served as a co-editor of the ASTERISK book series at Duke University Press with Susan Stryker and Eliza Steinbock. He also supports public humanities trans scholarship as a steering committee member for the Mellon-funded TEN:TACLES (Transgender Educational Network: Theory in Action for Creativity, Liberation, Empowerment, and Service) project, which launched in the summer of 2024. He was an editorial board member of the Transgender Studies Quarterly from 2014 to 2020. Chen has organized numerous public events, conferences, and internal knowledge sharing gatherings for academic units at Ohio State and beyond to help build networks across communities at the university and across academic and nonacademic sectors.