I am a PhD Candidate in English at UC Irvine with interests in early 20th-century Asian/American literature, historical materialism, and the novel. My dissertation is supported in part by Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, and examines Chinese North American novels between 1931 and 1955 as they mediate racial form and Asian/American literary history. In particular, I examine the pre-formation of Asian American literature over a history of political, economic, and cultural entanglements between China and America, perceptible especially as a proliferation of the Chinese novel form translated into the American publication landscape. As historiography, my project is interested in how American race and class relations are refracted through transnational migration and cultural circulation. 

My work has appeared in Situations: Cultural Studies in the Asian Context, Room Magazine, and the Toronto-based arts documentation and zine collective TACLA. Prior to graduate school at UC Irvine, I worked in Chinese-English translation and freelance photography, and completed an MA at the Centre for Comparative Literature, University of Toronto. 

At UCHRI, I am working as a Graduate Student Researcher in Communications, and I am excited to make humanistic research and grant information more accessible through social media and in-person and online programming for UC faculty and graduate students. Currently, I am also an Assistant Director of UC Irvine’s Global Asias Research Cluster. When I’m not reading and writing, I am gardening, drawing, and going on slow runs.