E.K. Tan is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies in the Department of English, and Asian and Asian American Studies at Stony Brook University. He received his Ph.D. in Comparative and World Literature from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He specializes in the intersection of Anglophone and Sinophone literature, cinema, and culture from Southeast Asia, postcolonial studies, diaspora studies, film theory, queer Asian studies, and world literature and cinema.

His first book Rethinking Chineseness: Translational Sinophone Identities in the Nanyang Literary World examines the relationship between the Nanyang Chinese, their original homelands (Borneo, Malaysia and Singapore), and their imaginary homeland (China) through the works of Anglophone and Sinophone writers such as Kuo Pao Kun (郭寶崑), Zhang Guixing (張貴興) and Vyvyane Loh(羅惠賢). The manuscript identifies the methods with which these writers have reclaimed a sense of belonging to their homelands by destabilizing the notion of Chineseness. It argues that, as a Sinophone culture, the Nanyang Chinese identity is translatable, translational and relational as it traverses between the local and the global.