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RESEARCH & TEACHING INTERESTS<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n 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<\/em><\/p>\n Trained by specialists on Southeast Asia who taught me that the region\u2019s past could not be apprehended solely \u201cfrom the deck of the ship,\u201d 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 \u201cWestern\u201d 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.<\/p>\n My first book Refiguring Women, Colonialism, and Modernity in Burma<\/em> (University of Hawai\u2019i Press, 2011) examined colonial politics, gender and race relations, social reforms, anticolonialism, media, and consumerism in colonial Burma (also known as Myanmar). In my second book, InterAsian Intimacies across Religion, Race, and Colonialism<\/em> (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\u2019s 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\u2014and remains\u2014foundational to modern regimes of knowledge, power, and desire throughout Asia.<\/p>\n My next book project, \u201cRestless Remains: Caring for the Dead in an Overseas Japanese Cemetery,\u201d is a historical study of the nihon jin bochi<\/em> (Japanese cemetery) in Yangon, Burma. Dozens of nihon jin bochi<\/em> dot the landscape of Southeast Asia, a region that Japan occupied during the Second World War.\u00a0Based on oral history, photographic documentation, and archival research, \u201cRestless Remains\u201d traces the little-known history of Japanese transnational subjects who have been retroactively claimed by the Japanese state as \u201cJapanese nationals\u201d and yet whose stories of mobility and belonging counter narratives centered on nation-states. This history disrupts conventional narratives that construct lower classes and castes of migrants, particularly women, as trafficking victims or dependent members of family and kinship networks in diaspora\u2014and, as such, passive followers rather than active agents in migration and empire-building.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"