Karen Tongson is the author of Normporn: Queer Viewers and the TV that Soothes Us (November 2023), Why Karen Carpenter Matters (2019), and Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries (2011). Her current book-in-progress is titled, Empty Orchestra: Karaoke, Queer Performance, Queer Theory (Duke University Press). She received Lambda Literary’s 2019 Jeanne Córdova Award for Lesbian/Queer Nonfiction for her body of writing. Tongson currently chairs the department of gender and sexuality studies at USC, where she’s Professor of GSS, English and American studies & ethnicity. She also directs the Mellon-funded Consortium for Gender, Sexuality, Race and Public Culture. In 2024-25, Tongson will be a Presidential Visiting Fellow at Yale University in the departments of American Studies, and Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies.

Her writing and cultural commentary have recently appeared in Slate, NPR, The Los Angeles Review of Books, PBS NewsHour, The Los Angeles Times, The AV Club, Entertainment Weekly, and KCRW’s Good Food among other venues. Tongson co-hosts the podcasts The Art of Grief with Dr. Megan Auster-Rosen, and The Gaymazing Race (a queer podcast about The Amazing Race) with Nicole J. Georges. She also co-hosted the GenX-themed Waiting to X-Hale with Wynter Mitchell-Rohrbaugh (2019-2023), the limited series Angels International: A 2023 Women’s World Cup Weekly Digest with Jennifer Doyle, and the long running Maximum Fun series, Pop Rocket with Guy Branum, Margaret Wappler and Wynter Mitchell Rohrbaugh. For 10 years (2013-2023), she co-edited the award-winning book series, Postmillennial Pop with Henry Jenkins at NYU Press

Before joining the USC faculty in fall 2005, Tongson received her Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Berkeley in 2003. She held a University of California President's Postdoctoral Fellowship in Literature at UC San Diego (2003-2005), and a UC Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI) Postdoctoral Fellowship at UC Irvine (2004).

In 2023, Tongson held a Hunt-Simes Chair in Sexuality Studies at the University of Sydney’s Social Sciences and Humanities Advanced Research Centre. She’s also held distinguished and visiting appointments at the University of Bielefeld in Germany, and New York University.

Born in Manila, Philippines to one of the nation's founding families of Latin jazz—the Katindig clan—Karen immigrated to the U.S in 1983. She lives in Los Angeles and is married to media scholar and TV critic, Sarah Rebecca Kessler. Karen, Sarah and their surviving cat Corky are still mourning the sudden and abrupt loss of their beloved Lily (Corky’s littermate, and the most beautiful girl in the world) in January 2024.

Boards & Community Leadership Positions

Editor-at-Large, air/light magazine
Board Member, Project Q
Executive Committee, PopCon
President, Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present (2022)
Judging Committee for LGBTQ Studies, Lambda Literary (2020)
Jury Member, Allies in Arts Film Festival (2020)