I am an Assistant Professor of English and American Studies at Princeton University, where I also serve on the executive committee of the Program in Media and Modernity. In 2023, I was appointed Laurance S. Rockefeller University Preceptor at the University Center for Human Values. My undergraduate courses include “Asian American Literature,” “Global Novel,” “Model Minority Fictions,” and “World Scale.” At the graduate level, I teach seminars on Marxism and critical theory.

My article, “Cold War Remittance Economy,”︎ [PDF] American Quar­terly 73.3 (2021), received two major awards: the Carlos Bulosan Excellence in Scholarship Award from the Filipino Studies section of the Association for Asian American Studies, and the 1921 Best Essay Prize, awarded annually by the Advisory Council of the American Literature Society for "the best article in any field of American literature."

Beyond Princeton, I serve as Delegate Representative for Literary Theory and Method at the Modern Language Association (2023–26) and as a member of the editorial board of Critical Times, the journal of the International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs. I was a juror for the 2024 Asian American Fiction Prize, sponsored by the Association for Asian American Studies, and served on the steering committee of the Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminar on “Transpacific Thought and the Problem of Asia” (2024–25), directed by Kandice Chuh and Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu.

Research

What can literature tell us about political economy and what can political economy tell us about literature?

I am an inter­disciplinary scholar working at the inter­section of literature and economy, with a parti­cular focus on Asian American and Philippine Anglo­phone literature. I read across literary and economic history and bring archival research to the study of narrative. My method is defined by a reading practice that elaborates historical meaning contextually and in the form of the works themselves. 

I develop this method in my first book, under contract with the University of Chicago Press, entitled Remittances, Literary & Economic, a study of novels and remittances in the Philippine diaspora. Framing remittances as a heuristic for reading the entangled circulation of labor, value, ideas, and texts, the book reveals the unexpected role that the development and dissemination of English-language literature played in the twentieth-century transformation of the Philippines into one of the world’s largest exporters of labor.

I have presented work from this project at New York University, Harvard, Yale, the University of the Philippines, the American University of Beirut, and the Institute for Critical Theory at Duke.

I am also developing a second book project that extends my ongoing interest in literary and economic history. The project reconstructs the Cold War evolution of neoliberalism and the ascendance of the so-called knowledge economy by turning to Asian American literature to uncover what I call the “Asian American character of human capital, logistics, and automation.” A chapter from this project, on how Chicago School human capital theory remade the model minority myth, was published in the August 2023 issue of Representations.  

Background

I received my Ph.D. in Rhetoric from the University of Cali­fornia at Berkeley, under the direction of Colleen Lye and Judith Butler. Before coming to Princeton, I held a visiting assistant professorship at The New School in New York City and an Andrew W. Mellon post­doctoral fellowship at Wellesley College.