I'm a poet who also studies poetry in an academic setting. At the core of my scholarship lies my enduring commitment to poets as creators, visionaries, and worldmakers. By which I mean that I'm inspired by Barbara Christian's invitation in her essay "The Race for Theory" to broaden the scope of what is considered "theory" or "theorizing." As she writes, "People of color have always theorized – but in forms quite different from the Western form of abstract logic… I am inclined to say that our theorizing… is often in narrative forms, in the stories we create, in riddles and proverbs, in play with language.” For me, my academic work of writing about poems and poets I admire is one way of honoring and caring for the community through which I've learned to encounter and understand the world.
Current Projects:
My current research project began as my dissertation while I was completing my PhD in the English and Women's and Gender Studies Joint Program at the University of Michigan. My dissertation examines contemporary Southeast Asian American literature and poetry through an interdisciplinary analytical lens I call “paper-work.” I trace the experimental aesthetic practice of poetically deforming bureaucratic, paper-based state documents employed by contemporary poets to provide an alternative narrative of US empire, highlighting the role that informal, soft power empire played in Southeast Asia beginning around the Cold War era and continuing to the present day.
I've found fruitful conversations across the fields of Asian American literary studies, lyric studies, queer and trans of color critique, performance studies, and (digital) media studies.
I'm also a member of the Digital Inequality Lab at the University of Michigan, an interdisciplinary group of scholars exploring questions of power and our digital reality through humanities and culture centered methods. We recently published our co-authored "Lag Manifesto" meditating on the intersections between the twinned pandemics of COVID-19 and anti-Black racism with the journal Afterimage. Check out our website to see more of what we're up to.
For examples of my current research, check out:
Current Projects:
My current research project began as my dissertation while I was completing my PhD in the English and Women's and Gender Studies Joint Program at the University of Michigan. My dissertation examines contemporary Southeast Asian American literature and poetry through an interdisciplinary analytical lens I call “paper-work.” I trace the experimental aesthetic practice of poetically deforming bureaucratic, paper-based state documents employed by contemporary poets to provide an alternative narrative of US empire, highlighting the role that informal, soft power empire played in Southeast Asia beginning around the Cold War era and continuing to the present day.
I've found fruitful conversations across the fields of Asian American literary studies, lyric studies, queer and trans of color critique, performance studies, and (digital) media studies.
I'm also a member of the Digital Inequality Lab at the University of Michigan, an interdisciplinary group of scholars exploring questions of power and our digital reality through humanities and culture centered methods. We recently published our co-authored "Lag Manifesto" meditating on the intersections between the twinned pandemics of COVID-19 and anti-Black racism with the journal Afterimage. Check out our website to see more of what we're up to.
For examples of my current research, check out:
- My article published in American Literature: “A Handful of Syllables Thrown Back across the Water”: Dictée’s Aesthetic Legacy and Thai American Poetics"
- My presentation at the 2020 Council of Thai Studies Annual Gathering, where my paper about negotiating diasporic Thai American gender identity through poetic practice won the Graduate Student Paper Prize.