Teaching Philosophy

My pedagogy is student centered, collaborative, and dialectical; I have experience working with students from diverse backgrounds to sharpen their critical thinking and writing skills, and am attentive to their various strengths, weaknesses, and needs.

Courses

Ecologies of Race and Migration

This course critically examines the relationships between migration and the environment, focusing on social and political forces that shape human/nonhuman movement and the natural world. How do cultural works centering marginalized communities reveal systemic inequities and imagine more sustainable relationships with land and water? How are individual and collective identities entangled with a sense of place, particularly when these identities are defined by experiences of migration and displacement? Understanding that place and sustainability cannot be divorced from identity, history, and culture, the class explores a range of critical and creative texts that investigate these questions through a global lens. We will also consider how literary and visual narratives can inspire and reflect on social movements at the intersection of migration and environmental justice.

Transpacific Speculative Narratives

How do Asian American and Pacific Islander writers imagine the future? How do ghosts, monsters, and cyborgs help us understand the narrativization of race in North America? In this course, students will be introduced to key narratives, aesthetics, themes, and social concerns of Asian North American and Pacific Islander speculative fiction, poetry, and experimental media through reading and analyzing primary texts. The course begins by interrogating how the Asian figure emerged in the science fiction imaginary at the turn of the twentieth century, as nativist anxieties in the US and colonial narratives abroad contributed to portrayals of Asian workers as “machinelike,” animalistic, and alien. Subsequently, economic and immigration policy have continued to shape Asian diasporic experiences with science, technology, and cultural production. Turning our attention to literary and cultural production by Asian North American and Pacific Islander authors, we will explore how these works engage the speculative, fantastical, and futuristic as sites of political contestation and imaginative possibility.

Asian American Literature

What is Asian American literature, and how do we determine its geographical and cultural scope? What is the relationship between Asian American literary aesthetics and political concerns? This course introduces students to the diverse traditions and key debates in Asian American and Asian diasporic writing, paying special attention to historical, social, and political contexts that shape our understanding of literature. Beginning with scholarship that characterize Asian American culture as inherently heterogeneous and capacious, we will explore the coalitional possibilities and incommensurabilities within and beyond Asian American narratives. We will examine key themes pertinent to Asian American literature such as immigration and exclusion, militarism and refugee displacement, colonization, gender, and sexuality. Key authors include: Carlos Bulosan, Sui Sin Far, Hisaye Yamamoto, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Thi Bui.