Biography
Teaching and Research
I'm a scholar in the fields of Transpacific (Asian/American Studies) and Queer Studies. I primarily teach composition courses, often with themes of US racialization in a transpacific framework. I also teach Cultural studies, Asian American literature, and interdisciplinary writing across the humanities and social sciences.
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.
Completed Research
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“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): forthcoming.
The Korean American actor Soon-Tek Oh's 1970 queer play about the Japanese American incarceration, produced by East West Players, is a strangely neglected cultural artifact. It offers an opportunity to grapple with Asian American queer cultural nationalism, targeting both racial castration and proto-homonationalism. I also reconsider Lonny Kaneko's 1976 "The Shoyu Kid" as a queer cultural nationalist text. The article and journal issue cover feature archival stage photography from Tondemonai.
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“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]
I interrogate W. E. B. Du Bois' political ontology in the context of the emergence of liberal pluralism (1920s–50s) in the entangled US and Japanese empires. Foregrounding his concept of a "color line within a color line," I contest framings of Du Bois as an "Afro-Orientalist" and simple apologist of Japanese empire, instead highlighting his interpretive overlap with pan-Asianism from below, particularly that of the Chinese revolutionary Sun Yat-sen. Further, I outline how Du Bois' 1928 novel Dark Princess is a work of queer praxis.
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“Rethinking Yaoi on the Regional and Global Scale,” Intersections: Gender and Sexuality in Asia and the Pacific 37 (2015). [link]
I theorize the proliferation of yaoi or Boys' Love media (a feminist-queer multimedia genre) in East Asia. My concept of "brand homonationalism" that links Kōichi Iwabuchi's "brand nationalism" and Jasbir Puar's "homonationalism" has been taken up by scholars of the genre.
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“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]
My earlier work engaged the intersection of US LGBTQ politics, identity and conservative religion, namely Mormonism, in the lead-up to the 2015 US legalization of same-sex marriage. In my 2011 article, I analyze paradigm shifts in Mormon discourse on homosexuality and gender from the 1950s through the 2000s. In my 2013 editorial, I contend with how LGBTQ civil rights politicking has been insufficient because of how the US state shores up difference in the interests of private property, including for spheres in which same-sex intimacy remains a "sin."