I am Professor of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies (CRES) and Literature. I direct the Center for Racial Justice at UC Santa Cruz, serve on the board of directors of the Korea Policy Institute, an independent research and educational institute, co-chair the UC Ethnic Studies Faculty Council, and co-edit the Critical Ethnic Studies journal. I am also a core member of the Ending the Korean War Teaching Collective and the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism. My book, A Violent Peace: Race, Militarism, and Cultures of Democratization in Cold War Asia and the Pacific, was published by Stanford University Press in 2020. Along with Deann Borshay Liem, I co-directed the Legacies of the Korean War oral history project. I also guest-edited a two-volume thematic issue of Critical Asian Studies on Reframing North Korean Human Rights (2013-14); a special issue of positions: asia critique on The Unending Korean War (2015); and a forum of The Abusable Past on “White Terror, ‘Red’ Island: A People’s Archive of the Jeju 4.3 Uprising and Massacre.”
Transnational Asian American literature and cultural criticism; African American literature and black freedom studies; comparative ethnic studies; critical race theory; critical Korean studies; U.S. military empire in Asia and the Pacific; decolonization; human rights discourse; law and literature; comics
Asian American literature and cultural criticism; African American literature and black freedom studies; Korean diasporic cultural production; Pacific Rim studies; postcolonial theory; comparative critical race studies; human rights; law and literature; narrative theory; film and visual studies
2015-16 American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship
2014-15 Excellence in Teaching Award, Committee on Teaching, UC Santa Cruz
2013 California Council for the Humanities Community Stories Grant for "Legacies of the Korean War"
2011 Chancellor’s Achievement Award for Diversity, UC Santa Cruz
2009 Julien Mezey Dissertation Award, Association for the Study of Law, Culture, and the Humanities
“‘War Is the Force That Gives Us Meaning’: Militarized Queerness, Racial Masking, and Korean War Mascotry.” "The Afterlives of the Korean War." Centre for the Study of Korea annual symposium, University of Toronto, Fall 2014.
"The University as Contested Terrain: The Origins of Ethnic Studies and Resistance to Empire." "The Nuclear University and U.S. Power in the Pacific." UC Berkeley, Fall 2014.
"The Mirror of North Korean Human Rights: Technologies of Liberation, Technologies of War." Center for Korean Studies, SUNY Stony Brook, Fall 2013.
“The First Year of Peace on the Korean Peninsula.” Sixty Years of Unending Korean War panel. “Peoples of the Pacific: Confronting Militarization, Resource Theft, Globalization, and America’s ‘Pacific Pivot.’” Moana Nui Teach-In 2013. Oakland, Spring 2013.
Invited lecture. “International Conference on ‘Non-peace’ Structure and Culture on the Korean Peninsula: Dialogue between the Humanities and Social Sciences.” Institute of Peace and Unification Studies, Seoul National University, Summer 2012.
“Border-Crossing in the World Republic of Letters: South Korean and Korean American Rearguard Fictions of the Korean War.” Invited presentation. “Changing Boundaries and Reshaping Itineraries: An International Conference on Asian American Expressive Culture.” Beijing Foreign Studies University, Summer 2012.
“Pyongyang Lost: Counterintelligence and Deterritorializing Fictions of the ‘Forgotten War.’” “Solidarity and Trespasses: Cultural Formations of Cold War Cosmopolitanism in East Asia.” Association for Asian Studies annual conference. Toronto, Canada, Spring 2012.
“Double V Blueprint, Cold War Novel: Invisible Man and the ‘War Within the War.’” Invited lecture. First annual “Cabrillo Reads” lecture. Cabrillo College, Winter 2012.
“The Strange Afterlife of Jim Crow: Mixed-Race Politics in U.S. Military Ghettoes in Asia.” “Blurring the Color Line: Racial Soldiering and U.S. Militarism in the Cold War Pacific.” American Studies Association Annual Meeting. San Antonio, Fall 2010.
“The Undercommons of Critical Asian and Asian American Studies.” Plenary Panel on Asian American Activism and the Academy. Association of Asian American Studies Conference, invited lecture. Austin, TX, Spring 2010.
“Architectures of Grievance: Memorializing Wartime Ruin in North Korea and Viet Nam.” “transPOP: Korea Vietnam Remix Symposium,” in conjunction with transPOP exhibit at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. UC Berkeley, Spring 2009.
“U.S. Extraterritoriality and Trans-Pacific Literature of the Camptown.” UC President’s Postdoctoral Retreat. UCLA Lake Arrowhead Center, Spring 2008.
“The Price of Liberation: Korea, the ‘Forgotten War,’ and the Cultural Politics of Debt.” Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Luncheon. UC Berkeley, Fall 2007.
“‘Freedom Cannot Be Legislated’: James Baldwin and the Russell Tribunal on Vietnam.” American Comparative Literature Association. Puebla, Mexico, Spring 2007.
"The World-Form of Human Rights Comics." The Routledge Companion to Literature and Human Rights. Ed. Sophia McClennan and Alexandra Moore. Routledge, 2015, 193-205.
Introduction, The Unending Korean War. Special issue of positions: asia critique 23:4 (2015), 597-617.
"Manufacturing Dissidence: Arts and Letters of North Korea's 'Second Culture." The Unending Korean War. Special issue of positions: asia critique 23:4 (2015), 743-784.
"Illustrating the Postwar Peace: Miné Okubo, the 'Citizen-Subject' of Japan, and Fortune Magazine." American Quarterly 77:1 (2015), 105-140.
“The Mirror of North Korean Human Rights: Technologies of Liberation, Technologies of War.” Reframing North Korean Human Rights. Co-edited with Hazel Smith. Thematic issue of Critical Asian Studies 45:4 (2013), 561-592.
“Pyongyang Lost: Counterintelligence and Other Fictions of ‘the Forgotten War.’” American Literature and Culture in an Age of Cold War: A Critical Reassessment. Ed. Steven Belletto and Daniel Grausam. University of Iowa Press, 2012, 125-162.
“Flashforward Democracy: American Exceptionalism and the Atomic Bomb in Barefoot Gen.” Literary Forms and Human Rights. Special issue of Comparative Literature Studies 46:1 (2009), 125-155.
