Expertise:

transnational American studies politics and culture of olfaction Asian American/Asian diaspora olfactory art

Language(s) spoken:

English

Professional associations:

PhD

a.b. Harvard University, 1998
ph.d. University of California, Berkeley 2004

I joined Concordia University's English department in 2019 after teaching at Yale University and UC Davis.

My research interests include 19th and 20th-Century U.S. literature, Asian diasporic literature, race studies, cultural geography, sensory studies, and the environmental humanities. I'm the author of Geography and the Production of Space in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Cambridge, 2010) and Sitting in Darkness: Mark Twain, Asia, and Comparative Racialization (NYU, 2015). My current book project, The Smell of Risk: Atmospheric Disparities and the Olfactory Arts (under contract, NYU Press), considers olfactory aesthetics as a mode of engaging with environmental injustice in literature, art, memoir, and law.

These projects have been supported by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Davis Humanities Institute, the Creative Capital/Andy Warhol Foundation's Arts Writers Program, Stanford's Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the UC Humanities Research Institute, and Obama Institute for Transnational American Studies, and a SSHRC Insight Grant.

I've served on the editorial boards of American Literature, Literary Geographies, the Journal of Transnational American Studies, American Literary Realism, and Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture. and the Broadview Anthology of American Literature, the Executive Council of the American Literature Society, and the Executive Committee of the MLA's forum for Nineteenth-Century American Literature. At Concordia, I am a member of the Center for Sensory Studies.

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