Kong Pheng Pha is an interdisciplinary scholar and educator whose research explores the histories and politics of refugee migration, radical queer, feminist, and anti-racist social movements, activism, and community organizing, legacies of U.S. war and empire, minoritized student experiences in the modern university, and Asian American racial, gender, sexual, and queer formations, with particular attention on Hmong and Southeast Asian communities in the United States.
His book Queering the Hmong Diaspora: Racial Subjectivity and the Myth of Hyperheterosexuality (University of Washington Press, 2025) draws from legal cases, newspaper articles, legislative hearings, interviews, oral histories, ethnography, activism, and performance art to analyze Hmong racial subject formation and cultural transformations against the backdrop of U.S. racial, sexual, and queer liberalisms. He is also writing a second book of personal narrative nonfiction essays about Hmong's place in a revolutionary America, and another academic book on the visual politics of invisibility, secrecy, and statelessness.
His academic writing has been published in the Hmong Studies Journal, Minnesota History, Amerasia Journal, Journal of Asian American Studies, American Quarterly, Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, The Rhizomatic Revolution Review, AGITATE! Journal, American Studies (AMSJ), Race Ethnicity and Education, ADVANCE Journal, and Journal of Transnational American Studies. His public scholarship has appeared in Hmong Today, The Twin Cities Daily Planet, The Atlantic, Asian American Organizing Project Blog, Reappropriate, Leader-Telegram, and Aperture.
Funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and in collaboration with a team of community curators across the state of Wisconsin, he was co-project director (2020-2023) of the community-based exhibit Los Tsev: Cia Siab (Hope) in Wisconsin, which was exhibited in Oshkosh, Milwaukee, De Pere, Eau Claire, Wausau, and Madison, Wisconsin to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Hmong and Southeast Asian resettlement in the United States. He is also a co-principal investigator (2022-2026) on the participatory action research project Our HMoob American College Paj Ntaub conducted with student activists and education scholars exploring HMoob American undergraduate experiences, which is funded by the National Science Foundation.
He has made media appearances on Wisconsin Public Radio, The Race, and The Social X Change Project to discuss Hmong and Southeast Asian American experiences, race and gender, queer histories, and contemporary politics impacting refugees. He has also worked with activists and community members on issues related to civic engagement and racial and queer justice. In 2025, he was awarded the Early Career Achievement Award from the Association for Asian American Studies.
Born in Ban Vinai refugee camp near the Thailand-Laos border to refugee parents displaced by the United States's secret war in Laos, he lived the majority of his life in Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota. He received a Ph.D. in American Studies and a B.A. in Psychology, Sociology, History, and Asian American Studies from the University of Minnesota. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Gender & Women's Studies and Asian American Studies at the University of Wisconsin—Madison.