Keva X. Bui (they/them) is an Assistant Professor of Asian American studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. They hold a PhD in Ethnic Studies from the University of California, San Diego with a graduate certificate in critical gender studies, and have previously taught and worked at UCSD, Pomona College, and Pennsylvania State University.

As a scholar, writer, and educator, my work seeks to untangle the entanglements of race and war as they shape everyday life under U.S. empire. My life has been intimately touched by war in multiple registers, from my family’s experience as refugees displaced by the war in Vietnam to growing up in Taipei in an expat family while attending an international school originally founded to educate the children of U.S. military personnel. These experiences have guided both my scholarly approach to studying the Cold War and my political commitments to the work of demilitarization in the wake of U.S. militarism. Across my work, I pay particular attention to how war manifests in everyday life, how we live war in multiple registers, and how war structures our orientation to the world around us.

My research and teaching spans Asian American studies, feminist science and technology studies, and critical militarization studies. Currently, I am writing a book tentatively titled Munitions Cultures: Anti-War Critique of Cold War Racial Science. This book project is, on one hand, a history of the race- and war-making violence of military science in relation to human and more-than-human environments; and on the other hand, it is a theory of how “race,” “war,” and “science” come to acquire different meanings and functions that structurally condition the U.S. Cold War in Asia and its enduring afterlives. My writing has appeared/is forthcoming in Amerasia Journal, Verge: Studies in Global Asias, Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies, and Journal of Asian American Studies amongst other venues.