Alan Williams

Activities and Interests

I'm an interdisciplinary scholar, teacher and creative writer. My research spans cultural studies, queer studies and LGBTQ history, Asian American and ethnic studies/literature, and transpacific studies (US-Japan, primarily) and global Asias. As a lecturer at UW, I've taught composition, interdisciplinary writing across the humanities and social sciences, Asian American literature, and cultural studies.

I published Ockham's Razor, a gay Mormon novel, in 2009. I'm currently at work on a queer (BL) political/ecofantasy novel.

Research

My tentative academic book project is titled Queer Liberal Humanism across the US-Japan Entanglement. Using the US-Japan or Nichibei relation as a case study, the book will analyze the intersection of racialization and queer exclusion/inclusion in order to better elucidate the workings of 19th- to 21st-century empire. Scaffolding projects include a chapter entitled "Queer Histories of Colonial Modernity" for the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of LGBTQ History.

Summaries of the following publications can be found on my personal website:

• “A Neglected Queer Play Hidden in Plain Sight: Soon-Tek Oh's Tondemonai—Never Happen! (1970),” Journal of Asian American Studies 28, no. 2 (2025): 197–229. [link]

• “Soon-Tek Oh’s Tondemonai—Never Happen! as Queer Cultural Nationalism,” in Interventions: Asian American Rhetorical Commonplaces Across Time and Space, eds. Amy Wan and Morris Young, forthcoming. [link to come]

• “Queering the Color Line within the Color Line: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Transwar Transpacific,” American Studies 61, no. 4 (2022): 31–63. [link] [abstract]

• “Rethinking Yaoi on the Regional and Global Scale,” Intersections: Gender and Sexuality in Asia and the Pacific 37 (2015). [link]

• “Mormon and Queer at the Crossroads,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 44, no. 1 (2011): 53–84. [link]; 

• “The Curious Case of Mormons and LGBT Rights,” Religion Dispatches, March 27, 2013. [link]

• “Raping Apollo: Sexual Difference and the Yaoi Phenomenon,” in Boys’ Love Manga: Essays on the Sexual Ambiguity and Cross-Cultural Fandom of the Genre, eds. Antonia Levi, Mark McHarry and Dru Pagliassotti, 221-231. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010. [link]

If you hit a paywall, copies are available on my Academia.edu page.

Google Scholar page.