丁香园AV

EDucation

PhD, English Literature, Cornell University (2006)
MA, English Literature, Cornell University (2003)
BA Honours, English and History, University of Toronto (2000)

Biography

As a scholar of empire, intimacy, and Asian and Asian diasporic life, my work is feminist, queer, anticolonial, and antiracist in methodology and orientation, and informed by my positioning as a second-generation settler of Chinese descent. After many years teaching at McMaster University, I鈥檓 excited to have returned to the Lower Mainland, where I was born and grew up (on x史m蓹胃k史蓹y虛蓹m land/in Richmond, to be more precise).

My first book, , investigates the centrality of reproduction to postimperial projects of governance and nation-building through readings of twentieth-century literature and policy from Australia, Britain, and New Zealand, and was published by the University of Toronto Press in 2014.

I鈥檓 currently working on a SSHRC-funded second book, entitled Archives of Intimacy: Racial Mixing and Asian Lives in the Colonial Port City, about Chinese practices of interracial intimacy and multiracial community under British colonial rule. Here, I delve into the heterogeneous social worlds that flourished in port cities like Hong Kong, London, and Liverpool during the first half of the twentieth century, developing vivid accounts of port city life pieced together from a range of archival materials, including photography, community and family histories, and wartime intelligence reports, that testify to the reach and limits of empire as a structure of meaning.

Although trained as a literary critic, many of my recent publications concern everyday and institutional forms of photography; and between 2016 - 2019, I participated in the SSHRC-funded . I currently serve on the editorial boards of and .

Recent Publications

• Trans Asia Photography 13, no. 1, Spring 2023.
• 鈥淐onversation, Collaboration, and the Work of Teaching Global Asia/s鈥� (with Anushay Malik). Verge: Studies in Global Asias 9, no. 1, 2023: 3-14.
• 鈥�(Un)Learning at the Edge of Empires.鈥� Verge: Studies in Global Asias 8, no. 1, 2022: 82-88.
• 鈥淪weating for their Pay: Gender, Labor, and Photography Across the Decolonizing Pacific鈥� (with Wesley Attewell). Journal of Asian American Studies 24, no. 2, 2021, 183-217.
• 鈥淓xit Survey: The Terrain of Struggle.鈥� English Studies in Canada 46, no. 1, March 2020, 13-21.
• 鈥淏etween Asia and Empire: Infrastructures of Encounter in the Archive of War鈥� (with Wesley
• Attewell). Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, vol. 20, no. 2, 2019, pp. 162-179.
• 鈥淟ocal Knowledge: Of Homecomings and Orientations.鈥� BC Studies 198, Summer 2018, pp. 25-26.
• 鈥淚ntimacy Out of Doors: Labor, Landscape, and Chinese Diasporic Practices of Looking.鈥�
• Photography and Migration, ed.Tanya Sheehan, Routledge, 2018, pp. 199-215.
• 鈥淟ooking in Stereo: School Photography, Interracial Intimacy, and the Pulse of the Archive.鈥� Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas, vol. 4, no. 1-4, 2018, pp. 19-44.
• 鈥淣ot the Asian You Had in Mind: Race, Precarity, and Academic Labor.鈥� English Language Notes vol. 54, no. 2, 2016, pp. 183-190.
• 鈥淭he Return of the Native: White Supremacy, Indigenous Rights, and the Struggle for Britain.鈥� TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, vol. 35, 2016, pp. 173-197.
•  鈥淟oving Revolutions: Reading Mixed Race at Mid-Century.鈥� Around 1945: Literature, Citizenship, Rights, ed. Allan Hepburn, McGill University Press, 2016, pp. 216-239.
• Better Britons: Reproduction, National Identity, and the Afterlife of Empire. University of Toronto Press, 2014.