About

 

RESEARCH & TEACHING INTERESTS

interAsian history; global Asias; gender history; comparative colonialisms; nationalism; communalism; religion, race, and sexuality; eugenics; sexology; intimacy; modernity; Burma/Myanmar, Southeast Asia, Japan; the Second World War in Asia

 

Trained by specialists on Southeast Asia who taught me that the region’s past could not be apprehended solely “from the deck of the ship,” I was encouraged to attend to the distinctiveness of local historical practices and mentalities, without losing sight of their regional connections and global parallels. They also impressed upon me the vital importance of grounded and situated knowledge that challenges predominant paradigms and categories of analysis derived from “Western” traditions. These intellectual orientations have shaped my interest in the histories of colonialism, modernity, nationalism, and migration in Asia. I have a deep commitment to interdisciplinary, intersectional, and multi-lingual research and scholarship, and engage with area studies specialists as well as feminist, postcolonial, and decolonial scholars working outside a specialization in Asian studies and history. My research has been funded by several institutions including the National Endowment for the Humanities, Japan Foundation, Toyota Foundation, and Mellon Foundation.

My first book Refiguring Women, Colonialism, and Modernity in Burma (University of Hawai’i Press, 2011) examined colonial politics, gender and race relations, social reforms, anticolonialism, media, and consumerism in colonial Burma (present-day Myanmar). In my second book, InterAsian Intimacies across Religion, Race, and Colonialism (Cornell University Press, 2024), I ask how interAsian marriage, conversion, and collaboration in Burma under British colonial rule became the subject of political agitation, legislative activism, and collective violence. Over the course of the twentieth century relations between Burmese Muslims, Sino-Burmese, Indo-Burmese, and other mixed families and communities became flashpoints for far-reaching legal reforms and Buddhist revivalist, feminist, and nationalist campaigns aimed at consigning minority Asians to subordinate status and regulating women’s conjugal and reproductive choices. Out of these efforts emerged understandings of religion, race, and nation that continue to vex Burma and its neighbors today. Combining multilingual archival research with family history and intergenerational storytelling, the book highlights how the people targeted by such movements made and remade their lives under the shifting circumstances of colonialism, capitalism, and nationalism. It illuminates a history of belonging across boundaries, a history that has been overshadowed by Eurocentric narratives about the mixing of white colonial masters and native mistresses. InterAsian intimacy was—and remains—foundational to modern regimes of knowledge, power, and desire throughout Asia.

I am currently at work on a new research project tentatively entitled “Restless Remains: Reburying and Redressing Empire, Migration, and War in Overseas Japanese Cemeteries.” Dozens of nihon jin bochi (Japanese cemeteries) dot the landscape of Southeast Asia, a region that Japan occupied during the Second World War. Based on oral history, photographic documentation, and archival research across Asia, I explore the history of Japanese diasporic and transnational subjects who have been retroactively claimed by the Japanese state and society as “Japanese nationals,” and the gendered, classed, and ethnic limits of mobility and belonging that have structured Japanese migration and imperialism in Southeast Asia as elsewhere. What lessons do the nihonjin bochi hold, I ask, for envisioning and enacting what Leo Ching terms “reconciliation otherwise”: practices of historical redress that refuse the geopolitics of patriarchal nation-states?