Jacob Lau is Assistant Professor in the Queer Studies Program at California State University, Northridge. He is the co-editor of Michael Dillon/Lobzang Jivaka's 1962 trans memoir Out of the Ordinary: A Life of Gender and Spiritual Transitions (Fordham University Press, 2016), for which he also co-authored an introduction to the text with Cameron Partridge. His work on Michael Dillon has been featured on Public Radio International's The World, The Irish Times, and EPIC's "Out in the World." Lau's writing has appeared in TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, Amerasia Journal, Keywords for Gender and Sexuality Studies (NYU Press 2021), the SAGE Encyclopedia of Trans Studies, Routledge Companion to Gender and Affect, Feral Feminisms, and the Graduate Journal of Social Science.
Lau writes on trans of color temporalities and affects in literature, film, and archival ephemera, through women of color feminist and postcolonial epistemologies, as well as queer of color critique. He earned a Ph.D. in Gender Studies from UCLA, a M.T.S. in Women, Gender, Sexuality, and Religion from Harvard Divinity School, and a B.A. in English from UC Berkeley. Prior to being at CSUN, Lau was an Assistant Professor at UNC at Chapel Hill in the Women's and Gender Studies Department and Director of the Sexuality Studies Program. From 2018-2020 Lau was a fellow through the Carolina Postdoctoral Program for Faculty Diversity at UNC, and prior to that was a UC President's Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Irvine.
