Department of English

I have just finished working on a book on how suitable pedagogical subjects, through schooling, emerged as a central biopolitical technology of power that was deployed in the materially different circumstances of the colonization of the Philippines and that of occupation Japan. Engaging with an archive of state-sanctioned proclamations, educational agendas, school textbooks, novels, short stories, film, and political cartoons I critically juxtapose two connected sites and two distinct temporalities to offer a new way of assessing U.S. empire in the first half of the twentieth century, one that argues that colonialism and occupation are linked vis-à-vis the assimilative production of “knowledgeable” subjects. The book, Campaigns of Knowledge: Pedagogies of U.S. Colonialism and Occupation in the Philippines and Japan (Forthcoming, Temple University Press), brings together the fields of American cultural studies, postcolonial studies, Asian American studies and transpacific studies.

Two recent invited talks that exemplify the breadth of my engagement with US empire studies and race studies are my response to current scholars writing about the “Barbary” states in a conference titled “America and Muslim Worlds” sponsored by the McNeil Center for Early American Studies and my lecture, “‘You taught me language’: Education, Racialization and forms of US imperial Governmentality” which was part of the Eminent Scholar Lecture Series at the University of Alabama. Three publications that are representative of my research are U.S. Orientalisms: Race, Nation and Gender in Literature, 1790-1890, “Decolonizing Global Theories Today: Hardt and Negri, Agamben, Butler,” “Colonial Management, Collaborative Dissent: English Readers in the Philippines and Camilo Osias, 1905-1932.” I have also directed a documentary, In His Own Home, about the police shooting of an African student on the UF campus. I am the undergraduate coordinator of the minor in Asian American studies and faculty advisor for Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and Sparks Magazine. Three courses I have taught recently are “Cultures of US Imperialism,” “Comparative Settler Colonialism,” and “Race, Empire, and Asian American Studies.”