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 make sense of 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 Disarming Empire: Race and Anti-War Critique in US Cold War Weapons Culture. This book project is a critical race and feminist science and technology studies account of US Cold War weapons development, illustrating how weapons of mass destruction are co-constitutive of racial and militarized logics central to US empire in the post-WWII era. My writing has appeared in Amerasia Journal, Verge: Studies in Global Asias, Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies, and Journal of Asian American Studies amongst other venues. Previously, I have organized with Viet Unity-Southern California and Hai Ba Trung School for Organizing, and am also a former board member of the Association for Asian American Studies.