TEACHING
INTRODUCTION TO ASIAN AMERICAN LITERATURE (Spring 2019; Winter 2021)
Literature survey that familizes students with Asian American literature of the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries. Placing these texts in conversation with key concepts from Asian American culture and history, the class explores the constructed, pan-ethnic nature of Asian American identity as a coalitional entity defined by shared histories of labor, discrimination, and national and cultural unbelonging. Texts include novels, short stories, poetry, zines, and class outings to events in Chicago.
ENGLISH 300: RACE & REPRESENTATION (Spring 2019)
Required class for English majors that introduces critical approaches to literary analysis--structuralism, formalism, deconstruction, feminist, biopolitics, and posthumanism--through readings of theoretical texts as well as primary texts by African American, Latinx, Asian American, and Native American authors whose formal experimentation challenges conventional understandings of racial, ethnic, and cultural representation through their narrative world-building.
MEMORY + IDENTITY IN ASIAN AMERICAN LITERATURE (Spring 2021; Winter 2019)
Upper-level literature and culture seminar that explores contemporary Asian American literary production by reading a variety of texts focused on the concept of memory. Focus placed on how literature functions as repositories of minority histories and memories, as meditations on the process of assembling and collecting stories, and as imaginings of alternative histories and futures. Texts include poetry, novels, short stories, comics, and film.
experimental embodiment: Gender and Sexuality in asian american literature (Winter 2018)
Lower-level literature and culture seminar themed around the concept of “experimental embodiment.” Class explores the interpretive possibilities of racial embodiment with attention to the relationship between aesthetic forms and embodied forms as well as through related concepts such as kinship, affiliation, masculinity, disability, and reproduction. Texts include film, novels, drama, and poetry.
Techno-Orientalism (Fall 2017)
Upper-level literature seminar that studies how twentieth-century and contemporary issues of technology, globalization, and financial speculation collide with a history of yellow peril and Asian Invasion discourse, including how these tensions manifest in figures and tropes such as robots, aliens, and cybernetics. Texts include drama, poetry, novels, short stories, comics, and film.
Archiving Asian America (Spring 2016)
Upper-level literature class on literary genre and form, national history, and theories of archiving, with emphasis on the Vietnam War. In small groups, students collaboratively design and complete a digital archive project.