Paul Nadal
Princeton University
About
I am an Assistant Professor of English and American Studies at Princeton University, where I teach courses on Asian American literature, global Anglophone literature, and literary theory.
My recent article, “ “Cold War Remittance Economy”︎ American Quarterly 73.3 (2021), received the 1921 Prize from the American Literature Society for "the best article in any field of American literature."
I am also an Elected Delegate (2020-2023) for the CLCS Southeast Asian and Southeast Asian Diasporic at the Modern Language Association.
My recent article, “ “Cold War Remittance Economy”︎ American Quarterly 73.3 (2021), received the 1921 Prize from the American Literature Society for "the best article in any field of American literature."
I am also an Elected Delegate (2020-2023) for the CLCS Southeast Asian and Southeast Asian Diasporic at the Modern Language Association.
︎︎ nadal@princeton.edu
Research
I am an interdisciplinary scholar working at the intersection of literature and economy, with a particular focus on Asian American and Philippine Anglophone literature. Reading across literary and economic history, finance and culture, value and narrative, I bring archival research to novel studies and Marxist aesthetic theory to develop a multiscalar reading practice that elaborates historical meaning contextually and in the form of the work itself.
I bring these research interests together in my current book project, Remittances: Literature, Money, and the Diasporas of Labor, which develops the first sustained inquiry into the convergence between novels and remittances. Theorizing remittances not only as currency but as a heuristic for reading intersecting circulations of literature, people, ideas, and value on a global scale, the book uncovers the surprising role that English-language literature played in the transformation of the Philippines into one of the world’s largest labor exporting economies. It argues that an important precursor to the migrant worker was the overseas Filipino writer, whose narratives of return envisage export-driven remittance economies as comprising forms of labor that are part of, but remain irreducible to, market calculations of social life.
My second project extends my ongoing interest in Marxist aesthetic theory and literary and economic history through a dual study of neoliberalism’s racial forms and Asian American literary emergence, tracing today’s digitally-driven knowledge work to Cold War-era debates about race, family, time, and neoliberal human capital formation.
