Research Interests

queer and feminist science studies; transpacific Asian/American studies; science and speculative fiction; posthumanism and new materialisms; militarism and settler colonialism in Asia and the Pacific; history of Cold War science; theories of embodiment

Current Research

I am currently working on my dissertation project, tentatively titled Empire’s Objectivity: Science, Asian/America, and the Making of the Cold War Human.

In the aftermath of the development and deployment of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the potential for scientific innovation and advancement emerged at the forefront of U.S. politics—garnering unprecedented military and government investment. Empire’s Objectivity theorizes the ensuing U.S. Cold War in Asia fundamentally as an intellectual project, one driven by the scientific apparatus of the military-industrial complex operating under the guise of objective rationality and intellectual purity. I argue that scientific knowledge production consolidates the organizing episteme of the Cold War human—defined by liberal humanism and capitalist modernity—that constitutes the social force of Asian/American racial formation in the wake of U.S. militarism and imperialism. Thus, situated at the nexus of the material and social ramifications of U.S. Cold War scientific innovation, Asian/America is uniquely positioned to unearth the machinations of the Cold War human.

This dissertation analyzes institutions of knowledge production, scientific disciplines of inquiry, and technologies of warfare assembled under the rubric of Cold War science. Through engaging a combination of historical and cultural texts, each chapter investigates the intellectual foundations of U.S. Cold War imperialism, ranging from the shifting terrain of science education in the 1960s to the origins of herbicidal warfare in the discipline of botany. In doing so, I suggest that the mythology of objectivity that undergirds Cold War science’s fundamental and seemingly race-neutral interest in the natural, nonhuman world obscures and enables its ideological and racializing contours as an imperial project. Attending to Cold War science as an epistemology of U.S. imperialism, this project contends that structures of the human—as species, as racial and gendered subject, and as liberal universalism—galvanize the logics of warfare across multiple Cold War geographies.

Photo by Vinh Bui