天美mv天美

Education

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

Biography

Between 2000 and 2020, I studied and worked in English departments across the United States and Canada, including Cornell University, Macalester College, the University of Nevada at Reno, and McMaster University. In 2021, I 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 teach at 天美mv天美 in the Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women鈥檚 Studies as well as the Global Asia Program. 

As a scholar of empire, reproductive labour, 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. My SSHRC-funded first book, Better Britons: Reproduction, National Identity, and the Afterlife of Empire, 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 in 2014. Focusing on Chinese practices of interracial intimacy and multiracial community under British colonial rule, my SSHRC-funded second book, entitled Archives of Intimacy: Racial Mixing and Asian Lives in the Colonial Port City, 1905-1949, will appear with in July 2026. 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. As Archives of Intimacy heads to press, I have begun work on a new book project that explores twentieth-century histories of dance as a practice of Chinese diasporic meaning-making for, against, and beyond (post)colonial, revolutionary socialist, anti-migrant, and anti-leftist projects of transformation and governance.

In my scholarship and teaching, I engage with a diverse array of texts and methods. Recently, however, I have been especially drawn to photographs as entry points of enquiry. Thus, for example, I鈥檓 working on a collaborative book project with my geographer sibling . Entitled Cold War Relations, the book turns to the vernacular photographic archives of American Vietnam War workers to explore Asian women鈥檚 wartime domestic, clerical, entertainment, and sex work across decolonizing southeast Asia. Between 2016 - 2019, I participated in the SSHRC-funded ; and currently serve on the editorial boards of  and . 

Publications

. Stanford University Press, 2026.

 Contemporary Queer Modernism, edited by Melanie Micir, Routledge, 2025.

Modernism/modernity Print Plus 鈥淰isualities,鈥� Volume 8, Cycle 1 (2024).

鈥淒ecolonizing Across Borders: Diasporic-Indigenous Encounters and the Predicaments of Arrival.鈥� , edited by Angela Naimou, 346-360. Cambridge University Press, 2023.

Trans Asia Photography 13, no. 1 (2023).

(with Anushay Malik). Verge: Studies in Global Asias 9, no. 1 (2023): 3-14.

English Studies in Canada 46, no. 1 (March 2020 [published 2022]): 13-21.

 Verge: Studies in Global Asias 8, no. 1 (2022): 82-88.

(with Wesley Attewell). Journal of Asian American Studies 24, no. 2 (2021): 183-217.

Visualizing China blog, August 2021.

(with Wesley Attewell). Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 20, no. 2 (2019): 162-179.

鈥淟ocal Knowledge: Of Homecomings and Orientations.鈥�  (Summer 2018): 25-26.

鈥淚ntimacy Out of Doors: Labor, Landscape, and Chinese Diasporic Practices of Looking.鈥� In , edited by Tanya Sheehan. Routledge, 2018.

 Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas 4, no. 1-4 (2018): 19-44.

 English Language Notes 54, no. 2 (2016): 183-190.

 TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies 35 (2016): 173-197.

鈥淟oving Revolutions: Reading Mixed Race at Mid-Century.鈥� In , edited by Allan Hepburn. McGill University Press, 2016.

 Tulsa Studies in Women鈥檚 Literature vol. 34, no. 2 (2016): 1-27.

. University of Toronto Press, 2014.

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