Research interests

transnational Asian American studies; feminist science and technology studies; critical militarization studies; U.S. Cold War in Asia and the Pacific; history of Cold War science; new materialisms; environmental humanities; literary and cultural studies

Munitions cultures

My first book project, tentatively titled Munitions Cultures: Anti-War Critique of Cold War Racial Science, situates the history of Cold War military science within a longer genealogy of U.S. racial science. In addition to 67 nuclear tests conducted at Enewatak and Bikini Atolls in the Marshall Islands, the early Cold War years of U.S. military science were dedicated to developing nonnuclear forms of warfare suited to counterinsurgent operations on the horizon. This book argues that these technological innovations—most famously napalm and Agent Orange—embedded racial logics of Asian expendability into the infrastructure of knowledge production inherent to the U.S. military-industrial complex. In doing so, this project reveals how racialization operates at multiple scales, from the infrastructural and ecological to the discursive and biological, in constituting imaginaries of the Asian enemy Other that shaped the material processes of knowledge production in an era of total war. Through engagements with Asian American political and cultural critique—from the anti-war movements of the 1960s to contemporary literary and cultural production—alongside military documents, governmental memos, and scientists’ papers, Munitions Cultures charts possibilities for demilitarization in the wake of enduring Cold War racial logics of scientific knowledge production.

Other Projects

I am currently working on two separate writing projects apart from my book manuscript. The first is an article on the Cold War legacy of international schools, focusing specifically on Taipei American School and legacies of U.S. militarism in Taiwan. The second is a co-authored essay with Heidi Amin-Hong, examining U.S. national and Vietnamese diasporic memory work that both memorializes and unsettles histories of U.S. military intervention in Southeast Asia in the wake of war’s ecological devastation.