Assistant Professor of English
Women's, Gender, and Sexuality StudiesAfrican and African American StudiesComparative Literature
I teach and write about transnational Asian/American literature, feminist science and technology studies, and queer theory. My book, Migrant Futures: Decolonizing Speculation in Financial Times (forthcoming from Duke University Press), examines narratives of futurity across a range of platforms – from subaltern science fiction to the financial speculations of the 1%. The book asserts that a history of racial capitalism subtends visions of the future and to imagine otherwise demands an excavation of this history.
I am currently working on another book, Transpacific Ecologies, which looks to the Pacific – the body of water, the islands, and their human and non-human denizens, as well as the nation-states and corporations that parlay across it – for narratives that help us think beyond a terrestrial-centric human history and toward a more diverse conceptualization of environmental futures. I use transnational and indigenous feminist frameworks to reassert a "transpacific undercommons" through which we might reconfigure relationships to the planet by reckoning with a disavowed ecological past.
"Specters of the Pacific: Salt Fish Drag and Atomic Hauntologies in the Era of Genetic Modification," Journal of American Studies, eds. Hamilton Carroll and Annie McClanahan, 49:4 (2015).
"The Cruel Optimism of Asian Futurity and Reparative Practices in Sonny Liew’s Malinky Robot." Techno-Orientalism. Eds. Betsy Huang, Greta Niu, and David Roh. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2015.
“Extrapolating Transnational Arcs, Excavating Imperial Legacies: The Speculative Acts of Karen Tei Yamashita’s "Through the Arc of the Rain Forest,” MELUS: Alien/Asian*, 33:4 (2008).
“Queering the Matrix : Hacking the Digital Divide and Slashing into the Future,” The Matrix in Theory, Critical Studies, eds. M Diocaretz and S Herbrechter (eds.), (2006) 167-192.
“Transpacific Speculations,” plenary talk at the English Language and Literature Association of Korea, Seoul National University, (Busan, Korea) 10 December 2015.
Panelist, "Intersecting Identities in a Multicultural World: Do Asian Americans Matter?" invited by Helen Zia, We Flourish: Celebrating Asian and Asian American Alumni at Princeton University, (Princeton, NJ) 17 October 2015.
“Speculation and the Speculum: Natal Alienation and Reproductive Futurity,” invited by the Five College Feminist Science and Technology Studies Initiative, Hampshire College, (Amherst, MA) April 2015.
Asian America: Triangulations of a Semisphere, invited by UC Presidential Chair in Feminist Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, University of California, Santa Cruz, (Santa Cruz, CA) February 2013.
From Sunshine State to Fog City: Asian American Comics in California, invited by the Graphic Narrative Project and the Stanford Humanities Center, Stanford University, (Palo Alto, CA) November 2012.
Works in Progress
"Im-Personating Asian American Corpses: Rachel C. Lee's The Exquisite Corpse of Asian America," book review for MELUS.
"Transpacific Futurities: Living in the Asian Century," Journal of Asian American Studies: Transpacific Futurities. Spec. Issue. Eds. Aimee Bahng and Christine Mok. 20:1, forthcoming February 2017.
Transpacific Ecologies. [2nd book manuscript]