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. I teach courses on Asian American literature, contemporary fiction, and, at the graduate level, critical theory and interdisciplinary approaches to the study of literature. 

My book, Remittances, Literary and Economic, is under contract and forthcoming in Fall 2026 with The University of Chicago Press. A chapter from that book, entitled “Cold War Remittance Economy” and published in American Quar­terly 73.3 (2021) [PDF], 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, which is awarded annually by the Advisory Council of the American Literature Society for "the best article in any field of American literature."

Beyond Princeton, I am Delegate Representative for Literary Theory and Method at the Modern Language Association (2023–26) and a member of the editorial board of Critical Times, a journal of global critical theory. Previously, I served as a juror for the 2024 Asian American Fiction Prize, sponsored by the Association for Asian American Studies, and as a member of the steering committee of the Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminar “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.

Entitled The Asian American Character of Human Capital, Logistics, and Automation, the book offers a new account of Asian American literature as emerging from the Cold War formation of neoliberalism and the rise of the knowledge economy. It traces how three interrelated keywords—human capital, logistics, and automation—gained conceptual coherence and social force through their intimate yet underexamined relation to a history of Asian racialization, a history that finds its literary and conceptual counterpart in the problem of “Asian American character.” What, exactly, does “Asian American character” name, what does it do, and how does it structure the way we read? The book argues that “Asian American character”—as a literary figure, a social type, and a set of cultural, racial, and gendered expectations—materializes within the tension between individual personhood and capitalist abstraction that human capital, logistics, and automation presuppose and reproduce. It further shows how this tension can be tracked through three genres: in Asian American self-help, which recodes the logic of human capital; in the ethnic memoir, which emerges from and becomes entangled with a transpacific history of logistics; and in Asian American literary criticism itself, especially in the ways this genre of critical discourse confronts the contradictions of redundancy that automation has imposed on contemporary artistic and academic labor. A chapter from this new 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.